Richard Yates by Tao Lin

Richard Yates Reviews

• 
  Megan Boyle

  Richard Yates (the author) said somewhere, "If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy." Tao Lin has said in multiple interviews that "Richard Yates" is intended to be a non-sequitur, but certain attitudes/ideas/thought patterns I have while reading Richard Yates novels were also activated while reading "Richard Yates."
  
  I read this book in ~2 days, lying in different positions on my bed, sometimes hunched over it uncomfortably or letting my arm go numb from holding it, remembering ways I've acted in relationships. Knowing that this is an autobiographical novel, I expected to 'side' with the Haley character, since it was written by him. However, I felt myself relating strongly to both the Haley and Dakota characters. Neither of them seemed 'right' or 'wrong' for acting in the ways they did. They were just two people doing what they do. It made sense to me, and I think that's what felt the most 'heartbreaking' about this novel. It makes sense for two lonely people with similar sensibilities to meet each other, feel like life is more exciting and worthwhile to live because of the 'world' they create together, start to realize they place different amounts importance on certain behaviors, discover they have different definitions of what it means to 'try' or 'care,' fight what they 'have' together until it is a nearly unrecognizable sliver of what it 'became,' and ultimately end up estranged from each other because they were just doing what seemed to make the most sense for both of them. It just seems like this is what people do. I like reading things like this more than anything, I think. Showcasing that 'fundamental human loneliness' seems to defeat it in a small way.
• 
  Toby

  Toby had read
  Shoplifting from American Apparel and absolutely loved. He went to Planet Books to find more novels from
  Tao Lin and they didn't have any. He searched amazon.co.uk and ordered two more novels from
  Tao Lin. He said to Leah via iMessage "they aren't going to ship until January 23rd. That's crap." Leah replied on iMessage "that is crap,
  Shoplifting from American Apparel was excellent, I hope the others are good."
  
  Richard Yates arrived in the mail 10 days before amazon.co.uk said they would ship it to Toby and Leah. Toby said to Leah's face "excellent! I can't wait to read Richard Yates." On January 20th Toby decided that he would read Richard Yates in two books time. On January 22nd he finished
  Foundation and started to read Ricahrd Yates. He had high expectations.
  
  Toby read 60 pages before having homemade vegan lasagne with Leah and trying to watch a Hollywood mumblecore movie. "This movie isn't very good, I'm switching it off." Toby mumbled to Leah. "It was a lot better than I expected but that's not saying much" replied Leah.
  
  Toby and Leah went to bed. Leah went to sleep and Toby thought he'd just read a few more pages of Richard Yates before going to sleep. Toby read until he got to the index and his face felt sad because Richard Yates whilst written in the same style as Stealing From American Apparel just didn't make his face happy and smiley.
  
  Toby considered the great dialogue and how he too wants to vomit when he thinks about Bono. Toby thought about how awful and genuine Dakota Fanning and Hayley Joel Osment were and not simple caricatures or anything like that. Toby thought about the constant misery inflicted by these two people on each other and wondered how two people could stand to be alive when they are so totally and completely insecure about everything. Then he remembered that his head hurt from all of the depressing behaviour and wished he could take back having read this book to allow himself the pleasure of reflecting warmly on the writing style of Tao Lin and the joy he felt on discovering Shoplifting From American Apparel without quantifying it as "a million times more enjoyable than his other more famous book, Richard Yates."
• 
  christa

  I'm feeling pretty generous today, so I'm going to extend to Tao Lin a courtesy I'd ordinarily not. I'm going to humor him. For the duration of this post, I'm not even going to so much as roll a single eyeball over his whole "If you don't get me, you're obvs too old to understand me" bullshit. But please know this will end with my tongue bloody from restraint.
  
  [Deep breath]
  
  In order to do this, I need to consider his novel Richard Yates from the perspective that this is artistic social commentary that just happens to use words as its medium, and just happens to be in the size and shape of contemporary fiction. I think this is what Tao Lin wants.
  
  There isn't anything I would call a conventional plot. It's not burdened by arcs, or apexes, or climaxes. Rather it is something like a straight line, or an ever-edited pile of similar events. Maybe even a circle. Twenty-two-year-old writer/wanderer/underemployed/shoplifter/vegan/NYU grad Haley Joel Osment and 16-year-old Dakota Fanning have an iRelationship, built and shaped on the sort of inane G-chats that happen between people who are bored. They don't "talk" so much as "say." Mostly it's a collection of silly back-and-forths and plans for when they will meet up again.
  
  Consider the introduction to the characters:
  
  "I've only had the opportunity to hold a hamster once," said Dakota Fanning on Gmail chat. "Its paws were so tiny. I think I cried a little."
  
  I saw a hamster eating its babies," said Haley Joel Osment. "I wanted to give it a high-five. But it didn't know what a high-five is."
  
  Occasionally Haley Joel Osment (not the one of "Sixth Sense" fame) travels to New Jersey to see Dakota Fanning (not the one of "The Runaways" fame), occasionally Dakota Fanning travels to Greenwich Village to see Haley Joel Osment. They spend their time together walking around, shoplifting, doing it, and eating vegan food. Chat. Hang. Chat about hanging some more. They yawningly toss out suicide wishes.
  
  The closest thing to story escalation comes as Dakota Fanning starts copping to her eating disorder, and actually takes action in her death threats by leaving the house and heading toward the train tracks. Haley Joel Osment becomes more clingy, demanding to know the minute details of how Dakota Fanning has spent her day. It's a sort of quiet nod to a status-update culture, although this particular piece of art is curiously void of mentions of Twitter and Facebook.
  
  There is a total lack of emotion, both in the prose and in the communication between characters. I think this speaks to the impersonal slash personal connections that come from exchanging information in a way that allows for deletes, and time to consider phraseology. A place where you don't have to crack a smile to type "LMFAO." And even when there is face-to-face time, characters express themselves in the limited ways of online communication, verbalizing "I feel embarrassed" and "I feel sad" instead of turning red or making a frowny face.
  
  Part of me thinks that Tao Lin's cult popularity is, in itself, a ruse. A sort of antisocial entity testing his own peers for what they will admire. He has figured out a way to spiral viral with a quirky personae and a lack of capitalization, and he used it to build a following of emo teens in need of the internet's version of Jack Kerouac. Someone doing something different in a way that resonates. (Although entire Lin paragraphs could be housed in a single Kerouac sentence). Lin brand-drops, and is heavy on texting, chatting, emailing -- more than any other contemporary writers I've read. He doesn't have Bieber fever. He veers obscure, with hints of chain. Cool. He isn't past tense. He'll quickly become past tense. But right now he is superduper present tense.
  
  I had a writing professor in college who said that just because you're writing about being bored doesn't mean the story has to be boring. I'm looking at you, Tao Lin. This thing is a total repetitious snooze. Again, I think this is his intent: To perfectly convey the limbo of real life. Realistically, more often than not, nothing happens in the course of a day. Sometimes weeks. Two years can pass at status quo: wandering, eating, shoplifting, G-chatting with barely perceptible shifts in the median level of happiness, and little progress made toward achieving goals because those goals are still spongy. Moving toward them is more of a step toward failing than it is a step toward achieving. And it's so hard to commit to a path when there are so many. Especially at age 22.
  
  Here's the thing: This isn't a good novel. At all. It's dull. The characters are badly drawn and unlikeable in a distracting way. If I didn't love to hate books so much, I wouldn't have gotten past the first sentences.
  
  I definitely hated Shoplifting from American Apparel. And really, this one is written in the same key, with all the same ticks. The characters are inter-changeable between the two. But for some reason he is just a little bit more successful at getting his ideas across with Richard Yates. But I've seen bathroom graffiti that trumped American Apparel, so that isn't a huge credit to Richard Yates.
  
  
  That said, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this collection of words -- which means it succeeds on some level. It's a statement, regardless of if I found the statement a pleasure to read or not. I assure you that thinking about this book is better than reading it. Of course, I could be totally wrong. There is a chance that Tao Lin is just a shitty writer who has gotten lucky. That I'm giving him far more credit than he deserves. Just like his legions of freaky little fans.
• 
  Caitlin Constantine

  If it were possible to give a book zero stars I would have done it for this one. I cannot think of a time I have hated a book this much. I have read a lot of things that indicate Tao Lin is the future of American creative writing, that say he is one of the most widely imitated writers in MFA programs, etc etc. I would imagine that it's because his writing style, which consists of nothing more than declarative sentences that state action and dialogue as it happens, is very easy to imitate. Why bother with craft and wordplay and love of language when you can just write everything as if it is a gmail chat conversation?
  
  Ugh.
  
  That wasn't even my biggest problem with the book. No, my biggest problem with the book is that it is about a twenty-something writer from New York City who takes up with a 16-year-old girl from the suburbs and engages her in a destructive romantic relationship that implodes, but only after months of controlling, dominating behavior on his part. The female character, named Dakota Fanning, develops bulimia because the male character, Haley Joel Osment (are you puking yet?), says he doesn't find her physically attractive because she's chubby. He then strictly monitors her food and exercise, and when he finds out that she lies to him about things like binging and purging, he begins demanding that she give him minute-by-minute recountings of her days and interrogates her when he picks up on a single discrepancy. He is a straight-up abusive boyfriend, and we read about it from his perspective, which is that they are just this tragic, doomed couple when really he's a controlling fuckwit who cannot see past his obsessions with veganism and shoplifting to regard his girlfriend as a human being with her own agency for one bloody second. Lin seems to have no understanding of the actual dynamics at play, of the power imbalances, of the fact that treating another person like your own personal home-improvement project is a shitty thing to do.
  
  (I've seen some say that they thought DF was as much to blame for the dysfunctional relationship as HJO, because of the lying, which betrays just how little they understand about emotional abuse. When someone is constantly leaning on you to do this or do that or be this way or be that way in order to make that person happy, and you fail to live up to those standards, if you are entrapped in the cycle of abuse, you will more likely than not lie rather than incur the wrath of the other person.)
  
  In short, it was a poorly-written novel about a guy who abuses his teenage girlfriend. I did not find it funny or hugely intelligent or hilarious or any of the descriptors I've seen used to describe it in reviews. And this is not because I don't enjoy experimental literature. I've read some Kathy Acker and some Miranda July and I liked both. But I do not enjoy experimental literature when it is so lacking in heart, soul or understanding of actual human beings.
  
  I recommend this for no one. Read at your own peril.
• 
  Keith

  Considering that this is apparently not a book condemning youth culture but is, in fact, about Tao Lin being a
  statutory rapist, I'm sort of wondering how this book is going to be seen in 10 years.
  
  
• 
  Chelsea Martin

  Engrossing story of two hypersensitive weaklings and the horrifying inner workings of their relationship. Highly relatable.
• 
  mauve

  Depressingly good and like nothing I have read before.
  
  I read it after seeing a few interviews with Tao Lin, so when I read, it was automatically with a neutral facial expression and in his monotonous way of speaking in my head. This made it somehow a more intense experience then when I read shoplifting and didn't know anything about Tao Lin.
  
  I would definitely recommend reading this book. It may not be your style, but it's worth trying. If it turns out to be, you will love it. Plus it's rather easy and quick to read so it will not consume too much time. After reading it I even went to the store and bought another copy to give as a gift.
  
  What can I say about the book and writing? Innovative, depressing, childish, self-conscious, intelligent, funny, sincere, profound.
  
  The story is about how we are lonely beings wanting to be with somebody, wanting to be loved, wanting to care for someone, wanting to be cared for. But when we are in a relationship, we come to all kinds of problems because of our differences in communication, honesty, needs, fears, values etc. It's about wanting to be yourself but also wanting to be what the other wants us to be or thinks we are, wanting the other to be want we (think we) need and finding out they are not completely, not wanting to change them and wanting them to be different at the same time, wanting to be understood but knowing noone will ever truly understand you, wanting to know your partner but kwowing you will never truly know them, feeling disappointed in the partner because of all above, feeling guilty about all above. Feeling lonely in the end.
• 
  Alejandro Saint-Barthélemy

  I like the names of the characters. Gimmicky? Having called them "Lin" and "Jin" wouldn't be better. I like Macbooks being called Macbooks (I've being using Apple computers since I was 9, so I'm an applehead that can't put up with ugly and hard to use computers). I like the main character being a writer. I like the gmail chats, the relationship, the mind games involved, the honesty... I like the beginning of the book. I especially like the moment in which one of them rants about relationships. Not a lot happens in the book, but I've always been more found of people interacting to each other (particularly when in love relationships) than plots.
• 
  Ben Loory

  this book is hilarious and excruciatingly boring, both at the same time. i kinda wanted to hurl it across the room, but i was so enervated that would have been impossible, and meanwhile it is also somehow a total page-turner (despite having no plot), so i didn't want to put it down. it's also strangely sweet (in the sense of, here is a stuffed animal), while also making me think of
  The Collector a lot. in other words, it's a good book; not like the usual tripe, and actually made me strangely proud that it was written.
  
  also, it has the best cover i've ever seen.
  
  on the other hand, the publisher's blurb sentence on the back is absolutely fucking retarded.
• 
  Dottie B

  This book is brilliant. BRILLIANT. It's a book about young people in love. Relationships. Deep things, you know. Sometimes there is trouble. But you keep on keeping on. Also I saw a pic of the author and he looks really strong. I had a pet hampster once and this book made me miss that fine pet. His name was Hammie. So if you like hampsters, reading books about romance and great relationships, and strong men who know how to treat a women right, then this is the book for you. I only wish my daughter could meet ssomeone as nice and supportive and creative as Mr. Tao. I really do not understand the cover though. That's the reason why I was looking for his picture. I knew people don't have shells for faces. That's just silly. I did find some people with things worse than shells for faces. Look at roger ebert. What a tragic death. But what a perfect warning for the dangers of chewing tabacco. Just dont' do it. Personally, I think this cover does it an injustice. I would have discounted some stars but you know what they say. Don't judge a book by its cover. The cover should have been of two people holding hands or maybe eating spaghetti with the same noodle in their mouth like lady and the tramp. Now talk about cute. Go Buckeyes! And Go Love!
• 
  Paul

  Good lord what a dirge. Irritating doesn't quite describe it; infuriating may be overstating. This is the story of Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning (no relation to the celebrities), whom Lin insists on referring to with their full names every single damn time. It's really, really cute. Pronouns are used shall we say "infrequently," so about a third of the words in the book are the two characters' names. Very cute. What do the characters do? Not much. They mope around, whining to one another, having sex, overeating, vomiting. Lin describes the sex in ways like "She did something with her mouth to his penis for a little while, then he orgasmed." Very, very cute. There's absolutely nothing engaging about the prose itself, it's monotonous, which monotony is supposed, I suppose, to mirror the monotony of "everyday life" in the "iPhone generation." Sure. Fine. What's the point, then? Miranda July claims that "Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass—from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom." Definitely. Lin is definitely the first writer to depict bored people. Jesus, July. The book is certainly boring, I'll say that. What's more troubling, though, is the nihilism that prevails. There's absolutely no point in reading nihilistic fiction, though Lin seems to insist on it. Here's a typical exchange:
  
  "Why did you say you want to kill me?"
  "It doesn't matter," said Dakota Fanning.
  "Why doesn't it matter?"
  "Nothing matters."
  "If you kill me I'll be dead. That matters to me." (Ed's note: Since when?)
  "It doesn't matter."
  "What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything."
  "It doesn't matter, said Dakota Fanning. "Nothing matters."
  
  Well, okay. Here's another great sentence: "Haley Joel Osment vaguely felt a little confused." He vaguely felt a little confused. Now, I understand this is supposed to be funny. Many reviewers have noted Lin's humor. I guess I can see how one could consider him funny. I'd say troubling, I'd say irritating, I'd say frustrating. I'd say the one redeeming thing about this book is that it's short, which is kind of a bitchy thing to say, but there it is.
  
  I think Joshua Cohen said it perfectly in his BookForum review:
  http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/017_...
  
  Also there's this. I mean, really? Please. The world doesn't need this:
  http://www.livestream.com/booksmith/v...
• 
  Molotov Mosley

  Read this piece of shit book as it was the only thing lying around the house and I was bored. Depicts a sadistic older man emotionally and sexually abusing a young girl. And if that's not bad enough it turns out it was true and Tao lin denies none of it. Honestly if I wanted to read badly written misogyny I would have just checked out the men's rights board on reddit, that's about the standard Tao lin dishes out. Totally baffled and actually disturbed that people find this 'relatable' or compelling
• 
  tao_lin3

  I like this book. I can read this book in any mood and enjoy it, I think.
  The words all have meaning that my brain can process. After I read the words I feel emotions. Each sentence makes me feel emotion.
  
  I will read this again later on and probably more times later on.
• 
  Muhan

  Apparently when this was first published in 2010, when Tao Lin was still a young person, hipsters still existed, and Instagram has just launched (try to remember the original filters and glossed-over-shaded-dimensional-icon aesthetic), it was hailed as some sort of timely literary representation of youth culture in a digital age.
  
  The book is about a 22 year old unemployed depressive NYU grad writer sadboy who starts a relationship with a 16 year old girl in New Jersey. I’m about to tear this book apart for its themes and prose but please note that this is about a real relationship Tao Lin had with an underaged girl named Ellen Kennedy. The very light plot arc in which sadboy belligerently abuses underaged girl into a severe eating disorder and suicidal ideation is composed of them saying extremely boring things at each other in absolute monotone, primarily recounting activities they did or trying to arrange to meet up without the girl’s mom finding out,a prose style meant to represent or comment on the age of digital communication. This kind of vague moral panic/timidly edgy commentary on technology might have been passable in 1999, would certainly have been passé by 2010, in 2019 reads like the author is jerking off to his own artistically aloof disillusionment and self-absorbed sadness.
  
  The first 140 out of 200 pages is a lot of repetitive and mindnumbingly, even psychopathically, monotone transcripts of him gaslighting her into berating herself for not anticipating his arbitrary moodswings, displeasing him by not dieting and exercising enough to stay sexually appealing to him, and performing extremely labor and time-intensive tasks (like drawing a 110-panel absurdist comic or going through every single DM and email to find and recant every lie she has ever told him) in order to only slightly amuse or appease him.
  
  In 2014, Ellen Kennedy revealed on Twitter that not only was she in this exact physically and emotionally abusive relationship with Lin as a sixteen year old in 2005, but that Lin literally copy and pasted her verbatim emails from that period into this book. Lin responded in a truly pathetic Facebook post saying that he had consulted Kennedy while writing and publishing this book and then pretty explicitly implies that he thinks she was being hypocrite about it now (like it doesn’t take years for someone to process abuse), but that he was fully self-aware of his faults in that relationship (because he wrote about them in his #art), and that he was being the bigger person by privately offering to give her all the royalties or cease distribution. He ends with an insanely oblivious statement about how he’s only publicizing these private communications now because of the “massive shitstorm” of press calling him a rapist - like he didn’t fucking publish his own fucking confession already.
  
  I only looked all of this up after I finished the book and made up my mind that it was bad on its own terms. Even disregarding Tao Lin’s real life actions (which I really don’t), this book is at best an irritating man’s self-aggrandizing autobiographical/artistic posturing, and at worst a profoundly damaging text for anyone to read - thoughtlessly, artlessly triggering to victims and women, and affirming to abusers and men.
  
  @All men: re-presenting your abuse of women as art does not make your abuse of women art, it just makes you fucking stupid and still an abusive piece of shit.
  
  Check out more of my reviews on my website!
  https://readwithmu.com/
  And find me on Instagram :)
  https://www.instagram.com/readwithmu/
• 
  Bradley

  I read the book in two nights. The first night I was really bored, although it had a lot of good sentences here and there which were often funny. The second night I enjoyed it a lot more. I think it's a difficult book to like if the reader assumes the protagonist is Tao Lin because the protagonist is a total douchebag. It is very likely that the protagonist is entirely based on the author. But if reader does not read the book with this assumption, they will be much more likely to enjoy it.
• 
  Telaina

  If this hypoxic drivel is what is going to be acclaimed as good literature and good novel writing over the next generation, kill me now. While it is obvious Lin is a unique and talented writer, the self-obsession and minimalism of the prose is affected and posturing and unworthy of a writer with this much potential. Mere words cannot describe how much I hated this book and its surface and glossy treatment of the true suffering in this world.
• 
  Lockhart19

  A bizarre book detailing an unevenly-weighted romance between characters named Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment, mostly documented through the use of Gmail Chat. Yes, really. The uneven nature of their relationship becomes more clear as the book progresses, as Dakota Fanning (never simply 'Dakota') is only 16 or 17, while Haley Joel Osment (Tao Lin's stand-in) is approximately 25 and lives independently. The novel is at least partially based upon a relationship that Tao Lin had with a younger girl of about that same age, which lends the book an air of discomfort and unease for the reader. It's also worth noting that the celebrity names used throughout the book are also not representative of the actual celebrities themselves, and any tangential meaning to be drawn from the names is largely left to the reader to infer.
  
  The real highlight of this book is not in the plot, or even in the relationship between the characters, but rather in the flat, affected realism that Tao Lin evokes throughout. This might have best been articulated by a great article published in n+1, written by Frank Guan.( Source:
  https://nplusonemag.com/issue-20/revi...)
  
  To quote Guan in Nobody's Protest Novel, published on n+1, liberally:
  
  "The purpose of art was sympathetic consolation: by recognizing one’s own unhappiness in fiction, one could, if not abolish one’s unhappiness (everyone was inherently and irrevocably unhappy), nonetheless alleviate it to a certain degree. So art, since it reduced the net amount of universal pain, was fundamentally ethical—as with “politics,” “aesthetics” were entirely replaced, or nullified, or superseded, by ethics....
  
  The blunt, unnuanced accounting of “net” pleasure and “net” pain may owe something to utilitarian ideas, the sense of universal orientation something to Taoist literature, and the emphasis on individual restraint something to Roman Stoicism, but by far the dominating presence in Lin’s thought was that of the 19th-century German thinker Arthur Schopenhauer, whose concepts he discovered and absorbed during his college years, albeit outside class. Influenced by strains of Indian philosophy, Schopenhauer’s writings posit, in a prose style of extraordinary fineness, that an overarching force known as the Will constitutes the fundamental essence and existence of the universe; all individual entities, desires, and mentalities serve as expressions of this Will, and—constricted by the categories of causation and materiality—are entirely determined.
  
  And entirely miserable: dissatisfaction is intrinsic to Willing, which, even when it attains what it desires, derives no lasting happiness from that possession and soon lapses into the dissatisfaction of a new desire. Unhappiness pervades the Will in much the same way that the Will pervades reality."
  
  Guan later ascribes to Lin a sort of blunt "Kmart Realism" that pervades his work and writing style, as well as going far more into depth than I am able to do here (read the article). Given that Tao Lin has been generously described by many as one of the most important novelists under 30 working currently, Richard Yates is worth a read, if only to get a feel for the structure and form that underlie his writing. Even if it is somewhat depressing and cold emotionally.
• 
  Simon Fay

  Hayley Joel Osmond is a twenty-something writer. Dakota Fanning is his teenage girlfriend. They like to shoplift. They joke about suicide. They’re not quite connected to the world around them and the world doesn’t care all that much about them either. The power in their abundantly fucked up relationship is in Dakota Fanning’s hands, but as their romantic future is put in jeopardy, we’re gradually introduced to each of their mental problems... Dakota Fanning develops an eating disorder and Hayley Joel Osmond’s relentless need to micromanage everything Dakota thinks, feels and says, comes to the fore.
  
  At the outset, it’s difficult to sympathise with Hayley.
  
  He’s an older man who shouldn't be dating a kid. The only way to describe his behaviour is as mentally abusive, but he doesn't act the way he does for a masochistic thrill, rather, he has a compulsion to demand perfection from a partner who will never be able to achieve it, no more than she can bring herself to leave him. Ultimately, the dynamic that Tao Lin so deftly illustrates is one akin to a doped up couple unconsciously picking at each other's scabs.
  
  I can relate.
  
  I’ve had friends go through bad periods. I’ve been in a position to give them advice on a daily basis. At first, I'd offer it empathetically. Then, when the advice wasn’t taken, it would become more cursory. There were times when I shouted because I thought that that’s what was needed to make them understand. And when I felt bad for being too hard on them, there was a little voice in my head that said they only had themselves to blame.
  
  I didn’t realise how vindictive that voice was until I got into the thick of Richard Yates.
  
  There is a lot to read about Tao Lin when you decide to Google his name: Many people think that he’s an asshole. It’s commonly believed that this book is based on his own experience of being the bully in a relationship, and that the Gmail chats which feature prominently throughout the story are copied and pasted from actual accounts of the time.
  
  Unfortunately, I don’t find the accusations hard to believe, so I'm of two minds as to whether I should praise the work of a possible abuser.
  
  Nevertheless, I am grateful to have learned something about myself through his limpid portrayal of love gone wrong. As for my recommendation, even though the page count is small, the text is large and the margins are generous, I wouldn’t blame anybody for giving up on the story early on. But as many in the review section will attest, the dark, sadly relatable neurosis of the characters and the bleak honesty with which they're written make for a hypnotic read.
• 
  Tessa

  Did not enjoy or finish.
• 
  Matthew

  I had thought for a while that I would dislike this guy (i.e., Tao Lin) but that was based not on what he’d actually written but that he was like 22 and had four books published already. And that he’d named one of the books Eeeee Eee Eeee and I thought that seemed too cutesy and ironic. But then I somehow ended up reading some stuff on his website and also listened to an interview he did with Michael Silverblatt and thought, huh, this guy seems smart and well-read and hard-working and possibly worthwhile so I ordered this book and read it in a way I don’t read but maybe 5 % of the books I read: compulsively. The prose is straightforward and matter-of-fact and a little off-putting in that it has this weird robotic quality to it. Also, the main characters are named “Dakota Fanning” and “Haley Joel Osment” and they are referred to every time by their full names. Also, DF and HJO are girlfriend and boyfriend. DF is sixteen and HJO is twenty-two. Their days consist of chatting on Gmail, stealing stuff from stores, and eating vegan foods. Because HJO is a writer living in NYC and because I’d read that he actually dated a younger girl I was basically imagining that this was a not-so-thinly veiled version of Tao Lin’s life and perhaps that was partly what interested me: the book seemed real. Not only like the things in the book could happen and were believable but that they HAD happened. And the thing is, I think this is a really good book. Or let me put it this way: I really liked reading it, even if it was somewhat painful at times—as the portraits it paints are severely and vividly bleak. It seems to come from a particular place in time and seems to reflect a particular condition, that being two highly self-aware and self-conscious young people who are living in a world they see as chaotic and meaningless and yet still trying to have fun and do meaningful things and help each other and be real or at least truthful—somewhere between halfway and three-quarters through the book HJO becomes obsessed about whether DF is binge eating and throwing up and telling lies and therefore he becomes obsessed about whether or not she can be truthful. The prose ends up generating a lot of energy because it seems real—there’s a lot of transcripts of Gmail chat (written, thankfully, as regular dialogue) and it appears to capture the way these two would really talk. The effect is: it’s sort of hypnotic. There’s an effortless quality to the writing and the back of the book says that people imitate it and I can see why since it gives the illusion that writing can be simple and straightforward and unflowery and focused on significant and insignificant details and reveal any-and-everything in a character’s life, from the monotony of daily routines to a variety of inexplicable and pathological behaviors. All in all, It was weird to read about two characters who I probably wouldn’t like or get along with in person because in person they’d be shy and invested in being detached and possibly humorless but to read about them and the intricacies of their intimate lives ended up being compelling. Perhaps the most true thing I can say about the book is that I have never read a book that sounds or reads like this one. Four stars for making me think, making me wonder, seeming alive in a sad in a new way.
• 
  Brad

  I am not sure what to even say about this book. Being a Richard Yates fan, I couldn't help but be intrigued by the title. As you might have guessed, the book has nothing to do with Richard Yates and everything to do with its central protagonists, Dakota Fanning and Haley Joel Osment (people who just happen to have identical names of famous people). The book is essentially and in-person and online chat conversation of a teenage girl and early-twenties boy who fall in love (more or less). People who are offended by teenagers having sex will be offended by this book (I don't think that constitutes a spoiler.) It is full of stream of consciousness, non sequiturs, honest emotion and unarticulated confusion about emotions. I'm glad I read this book, but honestly can't say if I liked it or not. It's definitely worth a read if you're looking for something out of the ordinary. I think it certainly provides some kind of insight how a new generation trying to understand itself and its place in the world.
• 
  Brenda

  No sé. De verdad que no sé.
  No consigo entenderlo.
  
  Diría mil cosas, pero el desasosiego me abruma.
• 
  Kia

  It’s fine. Kind of my fault for reading Tao Lin in 2022
• 
  jess sanford

  I loved this book. I can say without sarcasm or irony or shame it assuaged me existentially. I feel like I admire a certain kind of commitment / effort required to write and read a book like this, and this has nothing to do with 'tedium' unless you're not paying attention, but that's okay, most people don't, and it has nothing to do with being a good or bad person or a smart or dumb person (okay, sometimes), it's just how people are. Art is hard, interacting with art is hard, finding art that is ready to interact with you as an individual is perhaps the hardest part.
  
  I really enjoyed the relationship dynamic at the center of the book. I think it's confusing and perhaps funny how many people seem to dislike this book because the HJO character doesn't seem to often be a great person to be in a relationship with, as if the book isn't fictional, and even to whatever degree it might not be, how does that reflect on the book? That itself is an interesting thing to think about, so I guess now I'm glad some people think that way, even if I think those people are stupid (though I don't, but still do, which is why I'm confused).
  
  What I enjoyed most about the relationship in the book is the confusion the HJO character feels when the DF character expresses cognitive dissonance daily in how she proceeds with her life, such as wanting to lose weight and be healthy while she is bulimic. The HJO character frequently gets upset and seems genuinely confused by this, as to why someone would say they want something or to act a certain way while never acting that way or doing what they need to be doing to enact certain outcomes in their life. This is something I personally connect with and find myself often doing. My personal feeling is along the lines of 'It often gets more complicated than that' but that just might be an excuse. I'm really intrigued that the HJO character seems to never 'suffer' from this; I'm curious if he really doesn't or the book is written in such a way that it only seems that he doesn't. My being intrigued by this is sort of stupid, though, as I'm interested in how he engages in the world this way if he really does, but if he really does it's not the result of any disciplined worldview (like I wish it were, so I could adopt it) but simply how he 'is'. This makes me wonder if this is still a worldview and daily practice that can be achieved by discipline and repetition, or if you have to be wired that way. This is the struggle that drives the relationship via conflict and resolution, and with it the novel. I'm interested in the disproportionate ratio of intense scrutiny on the behavior of the DF character, it shows some kind of abstract bias in the narrating entity. Again I'm glad for the extreme show/tell ratio--the fact that so little in the writer/reader relationship is dictated in this way creates a true sense of accessibility.
  
  I'm curious about people who have problems with the style of the book, because it seems authentically stream-of-consciousness to me in a way (or rather stream-of-existence?), it feels like a good approximation of how life proceeds, so if people don't enjoy the style of the book how do they go about their lives? It also seems that this book abides by the cliche rule of fiction to show and not to tell (just because it is cliche does not mean I think it's wrong), this book shows everything and tells essentially nothing. Like anything else, especially in art, there's as much meaning and enjoyment as is generated by your interaction with the book.
  
  I mean, is it true that a novel I've never read has literally zero meaning to me because I've never read it? If you read this book it has meaning to you, I think 'meaning' or 'making sense' etc. are lazy, ambiguous, useless terms. I think talking in detail about the degree and type of meaning you do or do not find in a book or piece of art is way more interesting.
  
  I don't know why I've become so interested by the people who say things about this book when they didn't like it. I just looked at the Goodreads profile of one of them and one of her interests is 'cheese', so I thought 'Cheese beast. That is apropos, but only to me in this instance for maybe 15 seconds.' This doesn't make her a bad person, though.
  
  I'm glad to have read this book and glad Melville House is putting this out. I thought that it could have easily been that this book might never have existed and genuinely felt intensely worried/sad/something, but that's a strange way to think about anything.
• 
  Conner

  Tao Lin is the single most difficult writer to give an exact star rating to. Most of the time when I read a book, I automatically have a pretty good idea of when I'm reading a 3 or a 4 star book, but for each of his books I've read without fail I can't arrive at a decision. I find that I'll usually stick a 3 on it, but a few weeks later I'll go back and rate it 4 because I can't stop thinking about the book. Maybe I'll do the opposite for Richard Yates. His books aren't always pleasant to read but I'd argue that the real experience comes from thinking about them.
  
  Tao Lin has this way of writing that has been described as "affectless", like a less idiosyncratic Bret Easton Ellis, but really he's found a way of writing that coincides directly with your thought processes. I think he's the only Generation Y American writer that can really be said to epitomize his generation. I'm not sure that people born before Gen Y would really "get" Tao Lin.
  
  Sort of like David Foster Wallace, and I'm sure this is an unfortunate comparison since David Foster Wallace almost certainly wouldn't enjoy Tao Lin (and really their styles of writing couldn't be more opposed to each other), he's got a knack for describing character's thought-processes on the page to an uncomfortable degree. There's this state of being that a lot of us constantly experience, it's simultaneously boredom and anxiety, and Lin is the only writer I've discovered that's really consistently portrayed it. He's not wallowing in it to prove any literary purpose, but it saturates his characters because that's how a lot of young people feel these days.
  
  His characters are clinically depressed, idly suicidal, cynical, self-loathing, sometimes drug addled, and existentially lonely and isolated even in the presence of another person or with the social crutch of technology, kind of like you and your friends. The first generation to grow up with technology is perhaps the most socially isolated generation there ever has been. From the outside that seems counterintuitive, and that's the whole point; it's such an internalized existence that the people that haven't felt this way won't get it, and they won't get Lin's writing.
  
  I suspect that the people who find this book annoying and don't get what the big deal is are the same well-adjusted people that will view this as satire; they're the same people that will tell you to "cheer up." They don't recognize themselves or anyone they know in these characters, and that's ok; Tao Lin occupies a very specific literary niche.
  
  But there are plenty of people I would recommend him to, because it can be very comforting to find a voice that seems to understand you. However, if you're only going to read one book by Tao Lin, I'd recommend Taipei, since it's more like a traditional novel than Richard Yates, which is written mostly in dialogue.
• 
  Mandy

  To read the review in its entirety go to
  WellReadWife.com
  There have been times when I have hated something that it seemed everyone in my world loved. One of those times was in my grad school Film Theory class. I enjoyed/found some artistic value in every movie we watched (Crash, The Driver’s Seat, etc) until we got to the film Breaking The Waves. I hated it. I even thought the ending was kind of funny. I voiced my opinion in the class and the teacher made some big deal about how when the bells rang at the end of the movie a miracle happened. Now I find myself in the opposite situation: I enjoy Richard Yates by Tao Lin. A book that many people in my little world dislike. Oh joy…
  
  I received a copy of Richard Yates by Tao Lin early because I am awesome a member of The Rumpus Book Club. To say Richard Yates has proven for interesting and lively discussion among the club members is putting it mildly. Richard Yates is an odd novel with an odd title and even odder character names. Oddly enough, it works…for me anyway.
• 
  Will

  Tao Lin: So what’d you think?
  Joseph Gordon-Levitt: I don’t know
  T: Why? I saw the tiniest dog today.
  J: I just didn’t like it. Maybe too close to reality. The superficiality and sadness.
  T: I wonder how much it weighed?
  J: People talking to each other through abrupt text messages. Talking at, not talking with. They almost seemed trapped in their own worlds.
  T: It was gutsy a little later.
  lol typo
  Gusty.
  J: I’m firmly rooted in this iPhone generation but I feel no connection to it here.
  T: I hope the dog didn’t get blown away.
  J: I liked the sense of subtlety but it bordered on incidental.
  T: I think it had a good collar and leash though.
  J: It just made me feel more sad and alienated rather than a temporary escape from loneliness.
  T: I’m sorry.
  J: I don’t know. I feel bad because you seem so considerate. It’s just not for me.
  T: I cried a little seeing that dog.
  J: Yeah. Maybe I’ll look at your other books when I stop at a B and N or something. It’s just not for me.
  T: Fly dog fly.
  J: Okay. See ya
  T: Yeah
  
• 
  David Beasley

  i might have hated this book.
  but i can't tell, so 5 stars and i think you should read it.
  
  
• 
  Janice

  
  http://janiasea.blogspot.com/2011/01/...