I read Tao Lin’s latest novel, Leave Society which forms the third book in what feels to me like a bildungsroman stretching across a trilogy, beginning with Taipei and followed by his non-fiction book Trip: Psychedlics, Alienation, and Change. It is auto-fiction like his work usually is, detailing a story about him living in Taiwan with his parents as he so to speak recovers from himself through better habits, social bonds with his mom and dad and their dog, diet and creative LSD and cannabis use. I’ve found watching his change from how he was in that first novel to be really affecting. I was supremely unnerved by the narrator in Taipei without, I think, Tao really intending me to be. So when Trip ended with a closely intimate retelling about how good it felt to visit Kathleen Harrison (Terrance McKenna’s former spouse), told with the exact opposite of the disaffected and lobotomized tone of the narrator in Taipei, I finished Trip wondering more about who Tao Lin had become in between these two books: and Leave Society is all about that author and his experience of becoming someone else intentionally and on accident.
Anyway, this little bit of writing from a scene where his mom notices how he has been agitated, and remarks on it by saying something like "you’ve been more angry lately, that causes Li (Tao’s fictitious counterpart in this novel) to say he has actually been more joyful and friendly this past year than he has been in a decade and her saying that means she should think of time through greater intervals than just this past hour, day, week or even year. I really like his writing and ability to describe things about experience that are obvious and ubiquitous but subsequently hard to appreciate.
‘I’ll always be… unhappy a few days and happy a few days.’’ Patched-together or hard-won coverings of positivity flew away with ridiculous suddenness, like hats, or else gradually and unceremoniously, over days, like paint. Cheerful talkativeness became mute disassociation. Thoughts went from rational and shareable to infantile and melodramatic. Feelings toggled from magical friends to tormentive enemies. History, the strangest, most mystical, and possibly the last chapter of biology, became unaffecting and dull.
He’s on record as being a fan of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and it seems to come through in this description.