The ##

Tao Lin is a writer who once went around to every Starbucks and stand pipe in New York City and pasted them with stickers that said, in big capital bold letters, BRITNEY SPEARS. He’s also written what will inevitably go down as the definitve act of literature of this era. It is called “Shoplifting From American Apparel,” and if you give in to the peer pressure to hate it, you will be missing out on something fantastic.

There are a good amount of people who hate this book. Gawker, the media weblog that gratefully acquiesced to The ## by posting about meta-enabling on Saturday, called Tao Lin “perhaps the single most irritating person we’ve ever had to deal with.” Powell’s Books said SFAA was “an amorphous work without many points of access for the reader.” But the people who hate this book are the same as people who laugh at a joke because everyone else is laughing; the people who hate this book do not understand that when they post that damning review, they are essentially the butt of Tao Lin’s elaborate and hilarious joke.

There are also those reviewers who, having been totally baffled by the novella’s irreverence and oddity, respond to it favorably lest they seem “out of touch” or “un-hip.” These are the reviewers who bandy about comparisons to Camus, Kafka, and Bret Easton Ellis. But these reviewers are too old to understand how all-encompassing Lin’s purview actually is—they are too old to actually understand the accomplishment that is manifested on the page, too old to actually understand what Lin has done.

I want to say straight off that I would post the entire novel if I could, as I’m hard-pressed to choose passages that I want to make examples of, but I won’t excerpt Lin extensively; instead, please click on this link and buy it. It will be a better purchase than the fucking burrito and beer that you’ll inevitably purchase later this evening. And this is coming from someone who loves burritos and loves beer. Just buy the fucking book.

But if I HAD to post something from the book, I’d  have to talk about the end of it. I don’t believe I’ll be ruining anything by mentioning the book’s conclusion (and I hope Tao Lin agrees). But the final scene takes place in Gainsville, Florida, where the main character Sam has gone to hang out at the University of Florida and see some bands play or something. The entire culture is eviscerated perfectly—subtly but effectively, never irritatingly, always hilarious—and then Sam meets Audrey, a girl who Sam had “talked to on the internet.” What follows is a series of events that have genuine heart; in a novella so cult-famously devoid of emotion, Sam finds something that seems to actually move him.

But the narrative doesn’t fall for the trick it seems to be pulling on itself: almost at the very end comes a bit of dialogue so deliriously surrealist that it seems to make the entire novel a moot point—but in a good way. It trivializes everything that Tao Lin seems to be doing, but it does this self-referentially, so as to recognize the absurdity of the entire narrative that preceded it, and therefore bestowing it with actual meaning, converting it into brilliant self-commentary, and instantly rendering every ignorant review totally obsolete. Here is the context-less exchange:

“There was a thing on the table and Sam touched it.

‘What is this,’ he said.

They touched the thing and looked at it.”

We don’t know what the thing is. We don’t know why Tao Lin incorporated this into a very important part of his novel. But we know this: this is not a random act of useless pretension that so many reviews think it is. It is a giant, wonderful “Fuck You!” at the end of a tiny, wonderful novella—this is how Tao Lin wins every time someone posts about his book.

In short, go read “Shoplifting From American Apparel.” It is twice as good as the last book you read. Here, we’ll get you started (MP3 of a reading of the first pages).