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Bed
"Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass 鈥� from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report from these places is moving and necessary, not to mention frequently hilarious."鈥� Miranda July A startlingly original voice announces itself immediately in this collection of award-winning stories. Tao Lin鈥檚 absorbing writing style matches a minimalist prose with a lyric sensibility, poignant compassion with a hysterical sense of humor, bitter reality with enchanting fantasy, and youthful outlandishness with a gentle, mature perceptiveness鈥攁ll in shaped stories that are a tribute to the form. In a series of pinpoint portrayals, Lin鈥檚 tales depict young people in a surreal place between irresponsible youth and workaday adulthood, wanting to reject both cultures in order to craft something different. But such rebellion is harder than ever in a culture dominated by outrageousness, and Lin sensitively portrays the struggle in a way that is highly entertaining, impressively smart, and ultimately moving. It will leave some cheering the war against a dumbed-down culture, others laughing at the tactics, and all concerned feeling like they鈥檝e got a new champion in Tao Lin. Tao Lin , also author of the novel Eeeee Eee Eeee , lives in New York City.
278 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 2007
87 people are currently reading
2,284 people want to read
About the author
Tao Lin
62听books2,569听followers is the author of (2021), (2018), (2013), and other books. He edits and is on and . He posts on
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 176 reviews
May 17, 2011
My friend and I went on a road trip this summer and she read "Sasquatch," "Nine Ten," and the story about the man who works at a library and sits in the back seat of a car driven by high school kids who either toilet paper or egg a house aloud to me. I had already read "Bed" three years prior to the road trip, but wanted to read it again, and my friend expressed interest in reading something aloud together. She would sometimes stop during the long sentences to regain focus and would ask me if she was doing okay reading. She read "Sasquatch" as we were laying in a park in Portland, Oregon and it was sunny and afterwards we both looked at each other emotionally, didn't say much, and seemed affected. I said something like "isn't this what life feels like?" I've read "Sasquatch" aloud to both my dad and my mom and a similar thing happened at the end, except when I read it to my mom it was on the phone and her voice sounded frail and she said something like, "wow, how beautiful, how sad." I have always felt kind of bizarre and lonely and like people don't see the world the way I do. The characters in "Bed" seemed to focus on small, sort of boring and sort of really complex moments that didn't necessarily have a positive or negative effect on them, but still felt important just because they were there, and that was enough.
March 25, 2008
I think I've reached my threshold with hipster lit. I optimistically continue to read books about people my age in New York (and in this case, Florida) who are miserable, but it never resonates in any sort of way that I feel is particularly literary, useful, or interesting. I am likely missing huge symbolic meaning (there were a number of recurring themes and objects... including toy poodles), but overall it felt like "faux depth." As I finished up, I thought to myself, "this guy would get along swimmingly with Miranda July... they have the exact same voice, except he's less funny." And lo and behold, when turned the book over to read the accolades from various authors, she was one of them.
January 27, 2012
Tao Lin writes a blog called Reader of Depressing Books. If Tao Lin were a Hollywood blockbuster his tag-line would be Writer of Annoying Fiction. Very tedious and exasperating. A lot of the time I felt like what I was reading was less of a story and more of an exercise in reduction, and not in a good way. For me Lin's extreme minimalist approach had the effect of draining all the life out of the stories.There is way to much 'he did that then he did this then he went to this place and did another thing and then he felt sad' type of thing going on, and no amount oh-so-kooky metaphors can cover up the flatness of the characters. I can deal with fiction about people who are bored or depressed or lost and confused about how to exist in any kind of meaningful way - Douglas Coupland continually confronts these issues with far more wit, humor, warmth and, dare I say it, hope in much of his work - but this just didn't cut it for me. If the author's intention was to make the reader feel the same levels of tedium experienced by his characters then I would have to say he was successful in this respect. Maybe I'm old fashioned and distinctly unhip but I definitely prefer my fiction a little less anemic and a lot more, well, story-like, or something.
April 7, 2008
Tao Lin, I read your book.
I liked it, for the most part. It made me want to write, which a certain kind of fiction always does. It reminded me of my own life at times. As a fellow Floridian ex-pat of roughly the same age, the Denny's references resonated. I don't know if they resonated the same way for people not from Florida. I guess it doesn't matter.
I liked the stories in the following order:
Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues
Cull the Steel Heart, Melt the Ice one, Love the Weak Thing; Say Nothing of Consolation, but Irrelevance, Disaster, and Nonexistence; Have no Hope or Hate--Nothing; Ruin Yourself Exclusively, Completely, and Whenever Possible
Love is the Indifferent God of the Religion in which Universe is Church
Sincerity
Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists
Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow
Sasquatch
Three Day Cruise
Nine, Ten
I think this may indicate that I don't like the way you write children so much. But maybe not, maybe I just found those stories less compelling.
I stayed in bed all day reading this book. I felt like I was being a little self-consciously theatrical, reading a book called Bed in bed, but in the final analysis I think I was just being hard on myself.
Reading all of these stories in one go was a little exhausting. I think perhaps your tone is a bit too consistent, but that's hardly something someone could fault you for.
I do, however, have a couple of complaints.
1. You use "eschatology" twice in this collection, which, I think we can agree, is one or two times too many.
2. In the story "Nine, Ten," you use the phrasing "_____ in the face" twice. I feel the problem here is obvious.
3. Also in the story "Nine, Ten": there is a typo on page 211. "It would take three Chopin's to beat up Glenn Gould."
I hope you will take these criticisms as evidence of the closeness of my reading rather than an overriding dislike for your work, which I feel is very enjoyable in an uncomfortable and too-warm kind of way.
I look forward to reading eeeee eee eeee, whenever the library here acquires it.
I liked it, for the most part. It made me want to write, which a certain kind of fiction always does. It reminded me of my own life at times. As a fellow Floridian ex-pat of roughly the same age, the Denny's references resonated. I don't know if they resonated the same way for people not from Florida. I guess it doesn't matter.
I liked the stories in the following order:
Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues
Cull the Steel Heart, Melt the Ice one, Love the Weak Thing; Say Nothing of Consolation, but Irrelevance, Disaster, and Nonexistence; Have no Hope or Hate--Nothing; Ruin Yourself Exclusively, Completely, and Whenever Possible
Love is the Indifferent God of the Religion in which Universe is Church
Sincerity
Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists
Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow
Sasquatch
Three Day Cruise
Nine, Ten
I think this may indicate that I don't like the way you write children so much. But maybe not, maybe I just found those stories less compelling.
I stayed in bed all day reading this book. I felt like I was being a little self-consciously theatrical, reading a book called Bed in bed, but in the final analysis I think I was just being hard on myself.
Reading all of these stories in one go was a little exhausting. I think perhaps your tone is a bit too consistent, but that's hardly something someone could fault you for.
I do, however, have a couple of complaints.
1. You use "eschatology" twice in this collection, which, I think we can agree, is one or two times too many.
2. In the story "Nine, Ten," you use the phrasing "_____ in the face" twice. I feel the problem here is obvious.
3. Also in the story "Nine, Ten": there is a typo on page 211. "It would take three Chopin's to beat up Glenn Gould."
I hope you will take these criticisms as evidence of the closeness of my reading rather than an overriding dislike for your work, which I feel is very enjoyable in an uncomfortable and too-warm kind of way.
I look forward to reading eeeee eee eeee, whenever the library here acquires it.
July 5, 2007
Tao Lin gets at some of those uncomforatble thoughts we have sometimes, and it makes you wonder if he has those thoughts himself or he just knows us all so well. But he also makes you laugh, and reflect, and all of those good things books should do.
November 5, 2017
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.
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.
September 23, 2014
I hate short stories so much. I hate them. All of them. Even the good ones. I always know a short story is going to end soon, so even if I sort of like it, I want it to end now. I can't stand the uncertainty. The constant thought of when will this end? If you're going to end soon, just end now. Do it. Now. Christ.
Lately short stories aren't even short anymore. They're so long it's like why don't you just write a novel? Just write a novel and stop torturing me.
Short stories make me psychotic.
But somehow, someway I loved Lin's story "Sincerity," about a couple of aspiring writers in college who fall in and out of love. It's the perfect cross of Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen, and JD Salinger.
I couldn't get into any of the other stories, but it was worth reading for this one alone.
"Though his face was turned away, he sort of forced a grin anyway. He hated it when people got so inured that they went around being sarcastic without ever changing their facial expression. It was inhuman."
"What did it mean to believe in one self? Wasn't that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and cliched - and with as many capitalization rules - as God."
Lately short stories aren't even short anymore. They're so long it's like why don't you just write a novel? Just write a novel and stop torturing me.
Short stories make me psychotic.
But somehow, someway I loved Lin's story "Sincerity," about a couple of aspiring writers in college who fall in and out of love. It's the perfect cross of Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen, and JD Salinger.
I couldn't get into any of the other stories, but it was worth reading for this one alone.
"Though his face was turned away, he sort of forced a grin anyway. He hated it when people got so inured that they went around being sarcastic without ever changing their facial expression. It was inhuman."
"What did it mean to believe in one self? Wasn't that just a sneaky way of proclaiming yourself God? It was, and Aaron especially did not believe in anything as vague and cliched - and with as many capitalization rules - as God."
October 30, 2013
okay, i havent finished reading this yet, but even if the last couple stories totally suck i won't change anything.
this is how more immigrant fiction should be... something to with being second generation but... secretly. i dont mean indierctly but secretly, like maybe you wouldnt even notice it if you weren't one, because it's about some universal nontrivial thing, which is felt by everyone but only exaggeratedly by the writer and his contemporaries.
also meaning: no exotic names. no foreign words. no exploitation of cultural oddities. no appealing to fascination with the other america. because there are second generation immigrants who seem well assimilated but maybe under the surface there are cracks and the cracks might run deep
this is how more immigrant fiction should be... something to with being second generation but... secretly. i dont mean indierctly but secretly, like maybe you wouldnt even notice it if you weren't one, because it's about some universal nontrivial thing, which is felt by everyone but only exaggeratedly by the writer and his contemporaries.
also meaning: no exotic names. no foreign words. no exploitation of cultural oddities. no appealing to fascination with the other america. because there are second generation immigrants who seem well assimilated but maybe under the surface there are cracks and the cracks might run deep
August 7, 2008
Tao Lin - pushing pretentiousness to further heights. Having an overbearing narrative voice does not mean you are a good writer. Nothing can cover up bad writing.
June 2, 2007
I liked the stories in Bed. The characters made me feel like they exist in thinking about themselves. I most liked reading the story about the punk band that showed "disrespect" for the dead with their song, "Fuck World Trade."
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August 7, 2024tao lin is likely my favorite contemporary author. this collection of short stories is a bit juvenile (2007! wow!) but there鈥檚 so much wonderful stuff here. his early work (this, eeeee eee eeee, etc.) feels less fleshed out and precise than his later work but i think that works super well. it lends a hazy fog to the worlds he鈥檚 building; it allows the more fantastical elements to slip in.
perhaps my love for this is a result of being on tumblr as a child but this is just so great. lin, even here, is trying to express the inexpressable loneliness of internet-age florida suburbia
perhaps my love for this is a result of being on tumblr as a child but this is just so great. lin, even here, is trying to express the inexpressable loneliness of internet-age florida suburbia
August 12, 2011
i've read every book tao lin has published, and have decided "bed" exemplifies what's at the core of everything, like this is his thesis statement as an author. actually, immediately after writing that i decided no, definitely not, any of his books could be his thesis statements. that's part of his appeal to me, though. these stories feel like anthems for self-condemned-ed-ly lonely, who tentatively hope for something better (whatever that "something" may be) despite a general lack of evidence from the (as my buddy camus likes to say) "benign indifference of the world."
the sometimes paragraph length sentences in "bed" feel deliberately paced to involve the reader in the thought processes of their characters, which results in this kind of unsettling, meta sensation (i.e. "am i reading about fictional characters? am i reading tao lin's thoughts? am i reading what tao lin wants me to think his thoughts are and does he want me to think these people are fictional or himself?") i know "bed" is probably realistically a combination of all of those things, which is what i liked most about reading it.
the sometimes paragraph length sentences in "bed" feel deliberately paced to involve the reader in the thought processes of their characters, which results in this kind of unsettling, meta sensation (i.e. "am i reading about fictional characters? am i reading tao lin's thoughts? am i reading what tao lin wants me to think his thoughts are and does he want me to think these people are fictional or himself?") i know "bed" is probably realistically a combination of all of those things, which is what i liked most about reading it.
July 6, 2020
The man can write a title and that's about it
April 6, 2022
It's a little surprising, I've always thought, that Tao Lin hasn't achieved a higher level of literary celebrity. In many ways he seems like perfect complement to the other so-called Great Millenial Novelists (Lerner, Rooney, you know the type), but then again maybe it speaks to just how innovative his approach to structure is, how sui generis his style is, that he isn't mentioned alongside anyone so banal.
BED, his only non-auto fiction, is interesting because it gives us another lens through which to get a glimpse of what his "project" is, whatever that might mean. While it's probably fair to suggest that Lin isn't a born writer of short stories, and that quite a few of the stories here struggle under the weight of influence -- Barthelme, Hempel, Wallace, et al. seem sometimes to take up more space than Lin himself -- at their best they offer a concise distillation of his broader thematic concerns. "Nine, ten," for instance, is a precise exploration of what the much-heralded "End of History" really means, and not in the narrow way Fukuyama intended when he coined the phrase, but what living with foreknowledge of the (probably) inevitable apocalypse does to a whiny, wealthy American and their children on a psychic level. And it's only because of his formal bravura that any of it rings true: you will find a style that stands almost in purposeful opposition to what DFW in his excellent essay "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" calls "Workshop Hermeticism":
The characters in BED are aware of their fate, their ineluctable doom. Jed, the ten-year-old in "Nine, Ten," gives us a perfectly reductive summary: "Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain鈥攍ife was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place."(He's a great prose writer, have I mentioned that yet?) Tao Lin is one of the very few artists working today who not only recognizes this truth, but is able also to respond honestly and, yes, beautifully thereto.
(I realize I've just spent a few overlong paragraphs on defining Lin's work mostly by specifying what it's not, but perhaps that's the only way to see the contours of work that is so much about negation -- the negation of characters with rich interiors, of plot, etc. And perhaps that's what we need at the moment.)
Anyway, it's probably only a book for Lin-heads, but if you only read one story collected here it should be "Sasquatch," which is a quietly heartbreaking masterpiece.
BED, his only non-auto fiction, is interesting because it gives us another lens through which to get a glimpse of what his "project" is, whatever that might mean. While it's probably fair to suggest that Lin isn't a born writer of short stories, and that quite a few of the stories here struggle under the weight of influence -- Barthelme, Hempel, Wallace, et al. seem sometimes to take up more space than Lin himself -- at their best they offer a concise distillation of his broader thematic concerns. "Nine, ten," for instance, is a precise exploration of what the much-heralded "End of History" really means, and not in the narrow way Fukuyama intended when he coined the phrase, but what living with foreknowledge of the (probably) inevitable apocalypse does to a whiny, wealthy American and their children on a psychic level. And it's only because of his formal bravura that any of it rings true: you will find a style that stands almost in purposeful opposition to what DFW in his excellent essay "Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young" calls "Workshop Hermeticism":
"fiction for which the highest praise involves the words 'competent,' 'finished,' 'problem-free,' fiction over which Writing-Program pre and proscriptions loom with the enclosing force of horizons: no character without Freudian trauma in accessible past, without near-diagnostic physical description; no image undissolved into regulation Updikean metaphor; no overture without a dramatized scene to 'show' what鈥檚 'told'; no denouement prior to an epiphany whose approach can be charted by any Freitag on any Macintosh."There is no easy climactic resolution, nor is there a prose-style that's scared -- the way the shiny, detail-rich but ultimately empty minimalism so ubiquitous in our current literary moment is -- to evoke the blurry, affectless texture of the twenty-first century.
The characters in BED are aware of their fate, their ineluctable doom. Jed, the ten-year-old in "Nine, Ten," gives us a perfectly reductive summary: "Things would get worse, he knew. There would be old age, cancer, arthritis, global warming, tidal waves, acid rain鈥攍ife was just a tiny, moonstruck thing, really, and the world was just a small, failed place."(He's a great prose writer, have I mentioned that yet?) Tao Lin is one of the very few artists working today who not only recognizes this truth, but is able also to respond honestly and, yes, beautifully thereto.
(I realize I've just spent a few overlong paragraphs on defining Lin's work mostly by specifying what it's not, but perhaps that's the only way to see the contours of work that is so much about negation -- the negation of characters with rich interiors, of plot, etc. And perhaps that's what we need at the moment.)
Anyway, it's probably only a book for Lin-heads, but if you only read one story collected here it should be "Sasquatch," which is a quietly heartbreaking masterpiece.
December 31, 2007
---
just bought an uncorrected proof of this book at a flea market and it says in bold letters at the top, "do not quote"...so i guess i will not be quoting it.
hoping for good things, and hey, if it gets tedious rather than great, there's always "Eeeee Eee Eeee" on the flip flop."
kinda been diggin on short stories and how powerful they can potentially be, so i have high hopes for this one.
yay for double-book books. i'll replace this with a review when i actually reads some of it.
*update 08.11.07:
this book, although i have read and re-read several passages, is poorly written. i swear i have read it clearly and objectively. the stories are forceful and absurd, creating sentence structures which stutter and awkward for the sake of being brash and creative.
i'm hoping that in the final short story i am proven heavily wrong in my judgment, but i can attest to the fact that after finishing the second to the last story last night, i had one of the worst night's sleep ever, tossing and turning and thinking horrible thoughts about the blandest things before falling asleep and dreaming of pillaging and underwater espionage.
i woke up achey and confused by daylight, and all because of this horrible horrible read. i mean, read it, because everyone says it's great. but it's not that great, and i had a mess of a time trying to attempt to give the words a chance to make an impression other than literary poo upon me.
**update 12.31.07:
on the last day of this year, i finally gave up looking for my copy of "bed" which was misplaced in my move between apartments. in the end though, i find that i never noticed it missing until now, and guess that it wasn't going to change the fact that i wasn't that into it at all. if that isn't a sign that you don't particularly enjoy a read, i'm not sure what is.
---
just bought an uncorrected proof of this book at a flea market and it says in bold letters at the top, "do not quote"...so i guess i will not be quoting it.
hoping for good things, and hey, if it gets tedious rather than great, there's always "Eeeee Eee Eeee" on the flip flop."
kinda been diggin on short stories and how powerful they can potentially be, so i have high hopes for this one.
yay for double-book books. i'll replace this with a review when i actually reads some of it.
*update 08.11.07:
this book, although i have read and re-read several passages, is poorly written. i swear i have read it clearly and objectively. the stories are forceful and absurd, creating sentence structures which stutter and awkward for the sake of being brash and creative.
i'm hoping that in the final short story i am proven heavily wrong in my judgment, but i can attest to the fact that after finishing the second to the last story last night, i had one of the worst night's sleep ever, tossing and turning and thinking horrible thoughts about the blandest things before falling asleep and dreaming of pillaging and underwater espionage.
i woke up achey and confused by daylight, and all because of this horrible horrible read. i mean, read it, because everyone says it's great. but it's not that great, and i had a mess of a time trying to attempt to give the words a chance to make an impression other than literary poo upon me.
**update 12.31.07:
on the last day of this year, i finally gave up looking for my copy of "bed" which was misplaced in my move between apartments. in the end though, i find that i never noticed it missing until now, and guess that it wasn't going to change the fact that i wasn't that into it at all. if that isn't a sign that you don't particularly enjoy a read, i'm not sure what is.
---
September 28, 2007
This collection of short stories must be a kick in the face for any conservative, religious, optimistic, or otherwise self-deluding individual. Luckily, though, a jaded, cynical sort of person such as myself can find solace in turning the pages of this book and laughing in an empathetic sort of way at the mishaps and awkward strangeness of its characters. These people are contemplative, refreshing, and often arresting in their views of the world at hand. It鈥檚 the quirky way they observe their surroundings, or the detached pessimism with which they guide each story from quasi-beginning to quasi-end. Each of these stories is a slice-of-life of which the narrative voice is the most important and compelling part. It鈥檚 a wonderful voice for a short story 鈥� modern, accessible, and entirely fitting to the stories. The thing is, though, don鈥檛 dive in expecting nine completely variant voices or nine different worldviews. By the sixth or seventh story, you start to feel like you鈥檙e reading the same thing over and over - said in numerous ways, but the feeling stays the same throughout. It鈥檚 this itch on your brain like your life is a film reel rolling past you and you鈥檙e just sitting in the back row thinking, I can鈥檛 believe I paid ten whole dollars for this. And that鈥檚 the sickness permeating these stories and plaguing these characters. I wouldn鈥檛 recommend reading the whole thing straight through, as even the most jaded among us may tire of the cynicism which coats every word of this book. But most (perhaps all) of these stories, taken separately, are excellent reflections on life in the modern world and its effects on well-meaning but consistently existential characters. Recommended for the younger generations, and those who appreciate (very) contemporary literature.
July 25, 2020
How did I not write a review? This is my 2nd read-through for a bookclub meeting that never happened (Hello, pandemic). Tao Lin writes existential, absurdist, K-mart reality lit about millennials. He writes in a way that is completely unlike anything I've ever read, and it is on point with the concrete, fresh descriptions. I'm a millennial and I am sorry to say (because these characters are so absurdist and awkward) that I get it way too much. Tao Lin might like me/hate me, but I'm a gushing fan. I gave a few of these stories to my HS students in a charter college class in Fort Collins, and I think they jibed with the weird realities of these stories.
October 19, 2010
This book has stories in it, and one has a giant squid that sounds like a cow that commits suicide. It also talks about the loch ness monster, and working at Dennys. There are nine stories in this book and they are all about different people who are mainly recently graduated or college students. The stories made me either want to suicide or to be very happy and I couldn't tell which. I'm still not sure if I understand a lot of it, but that's okay.
December 28, 2007
I liked this book much more than I expected to. It's odd and captivating.
Want to read
February 16, 2012Picked this up while waiting for a ride. Haven't gotten very far...
October 31, 2022
I鈥檓 calling it. Did I read every word of every store in this (very mixed) collection? No. Do I feel I met the requirements to say I鈥檝e 鈥渞ead鈥� it, were one to ask, or were I to add it to my READ list on 欧宝娱乐? Yes. Should 欧宝娱乐 create a shelf 鈩笍 for MOSTLY READ? Perhaps. But I digress鈥�.
Here鈥檚 the deal: the first 3 stories in this book? Fantastic. Original, funny, weird, compelling. The next 5? Derivative slogs in which all originality from the first 3 is being poorly copied, less-compellingly reproduced, and did not have the magic anymore.
Tao Lin demonstrates that he certainly has a few tricks up his sleeve, but after doing those tricks, it鈥檚 the same tricks over, and over again, each time worse than the last.
Here鈥檚 the deal: the first 3 stories in this book? Fantastic. Original, funny, weird, compelling. The next 5? Derivative slogs in which all originality from the first 3 is being poorly copied, less-compellingly reproduced, and did not have the magic anymore.
Tao Lin demonstrates that he certainly has a few tricks up his sleeve, but after doing those tricks, it鈥檚 the same tricks over, and over again, each time worse than the last.
April 2, 2025
Every story is too long and wincingly clumsy and essentially the same as the story that came before it. None stick out. This is Raymond Carver but about three times as dull and with no concision, plus the added annoyance of incessantly zany and utterly pointless millennial hipster humour. No.
February 12, 2023
Well, it seems like some people are born with brown hair and some people are born with loneliness
December 30, 2020
this book was hard to read in a slightly different way than I expected it to be hard to read
April 27, 2024
there鈥檚 so much truth in this. The stories in the second half are much stronger and meaningful but they all speak to something common about being human.
Read
June 4, 2022I took this book from my job
January 5, 2025
"There were moments when you knew for sure that you would never be happy." (247)
****
"It was so sad (except maybe in the way that all things are sad), as the three of them had never been close, but just mumbling and monosyllabic all the time, like an inwardly preoccupied people, distracted always by their own supposed alivenesses -- how their wet hearts, place there, behind the breezy hollows of the lungs, in the saunaish chest, warm and pressurized as a yawn, would sometimes (at night or in the afternoons, though sometimes over a few weeks, or seasons, even) feel tired and too hot, and then airy, and dry, and finally little floating and skyward, as if wanting to leave, having realized, perhaps, wrongly or not, that life was elsewhere; or, rather, that their service was not to these lives, not to these single people, but to some history of people, already gone, faceless and sadder as some ocean in some night somewhere, not touching anything, or existing, even, but feelable, still, sometimes, cold and temperatureless, like a sudden awareness of time, of being actually alive; a sensation of falseness, really, of being lied to." (263-3)
****
I thought I'd written about this book before, but I guess not. This is kind of annoying, as I didn't want to have to write about this now, as if I'm "compelled" to review books. The desire not to write was what took me so long to re-read this book.
Uh, I don't know. I feel like, if I were to recommend any one Tao Lin book to someone, maybe it would not be Bed. More likely it would be Shoplifting from American Apparel. But, I think, if I were to imagine such-and-such person would never read any other Tao Lin book beyond a single recommendation, maybe Bed works best(?).
The "issue" with this short story collection is simply that I did not read Lin's work in chronological release order. Accordingly, this was, like, my seventh Lin book, having first read it, I'm quite sure, after Taipei came out. So there's simply less capital-N Nostalgia here than for e.g. Shoplifting or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. If I'm going to pick a Tao Lin book off the shelf to re-read, Bed is, unfortunately, low priority. I can't even imagine how long it will take to come back to it...!
But yeah, if you've read Shoplifting or, like, Richard Yates, you'll know what to expect here, which may possibly make it a bit annoying to read nine samey stories in a row. Which is another reason why it took months to re-read (lol(?)). Many of these stories begin with a few semi-abstract paragraphs detailing irreal absurdist quasi-dystopias, before seguing into the same-ol' "it's just Tao Lin's own life and thoughts, generally, but he's given himself a different name, and sometimes the character is a girl instead of a boy." Gone is the outright zaniness of Eeeee Eee Eeee, but we haven't yet reached the bleak super-realism of Taipei. Lin writes a lot of fun(ny) and interesting passages throughout, but, again, there's kind of a sameyness pervading, so, also again, I'd recommend spacing the stories out by maybe reading like two a week, I don't know.
I will say, I was driven to blaze through the last stretch of three stories here, partly to finish any book at the start of 2025 to fluff my would-be 欧宝娱乐 Reading Challenge, but also because I've been lately feeling a bit (more) semi-"depressed," in the sense that I just don't feel like doing stuff with people, which unfortunately partly means I don't feel like talking at work, when I'm in the middle of learning some cool new shit, but also more broadly having little interest in Christmas or New Year's, as rarely I do, because I just don't "get it" anymore, but anyway my point is this all matches the Vibe of Lin's (early) work very well.
(Fun fact: Apparently, Leave Society came out in 2021, which has to be bullshit because there's no way a) the novel is that old, and b) I haven't read it since that year!)
****
"It was so sad (except maybe in the way that all things are sad), as the three of them had never been close, but just mumbling and monosyllabic all the time, like an inwardly preoccupied people, distracted always by their own supposed alivenesses -- how their wet hearts, place there, behind the breezy hollows of the lungs, in the saunaish chest, warm and pressurized as a yawn, would sometimes (at night or in the afternoons, though sometimes over a few weeks, or seasons, even) feel tired and too hot, and then airy, and dry, and finally little floating and skyward, as if wanting to leave, having realized, perhaps, wrongly or not, that life was elsewhere; or, rather, that their service was not to these lives, not to these single people, but to some history of people, already gone, faceless and sadder as some ocean in some night somewhere, not touching anything, or existing, even, but feelable, still, sometimes, cold and temperatureless, like a sudden awareness of time, of being actually alive; a sensation of falseness, really, of being lied to." (263-3)
****
I thought I'd written about this book before, but I guess not. This is kind of annoying, as I didn't want to have to write about this now, as if I'm "compelled" to review books. The desire not to write was what took me so long to re-read this book.
Uh, I don't know. I feel like, if I were to recommend any one Tao Lin book to someone, maybe it would not be Bed. More likely it would be Shoplifting from American Apparel. But, I think, if I were to imagine such-and-such person would never read any other Tao Lin book beyond a single recommendation, maybe Bed works best(?).
The "issue" with this short story collection is simply that I did not read Lin's work in chronological release order. Accordingly, this was, like, my seventh Lin book, having first read it, I'm quite sure, after Taipei came out. So there's simply less capital-N Nostalgia here than for e.g. Shoplifting or Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. If I'm going to pick a Tao Lin book off the shelf to re-read, Bed is, unfortunately, low priority. I can't even imagine how long it will take to come back to it...!
But yeah, if you've read Shoplifting or, like, Richard Yates, you'll know what to expect here, which may possibly make it a bit annoying to read nine samey stories in a row. Which is another reason why it took months to re-read (lol(?)). Many of these stories begin with a few semi-abstract paragraphs detailing irreal absurdist quasi-dystopias, before seguing into the same-ol' "it's just Tao Lin's own life and thoughts, generally, but he's given himself a different name, and sometimes the character is a girl instead of a boy." Gone is the outright zaniness of Eeeee Eee Eeee, but we haven't yet reached the bleak super-realism of Taipei. Lin writes a lot of fun(ny) and interesting passages throughout, but, again, there's kind of a sameyness pervading, so, also again, I'd recommend spacing the stories out by maybe reading like two a week, I don't know.
I will say, I was driven to blaze through the last stretch of three stories here, partly to finish any book at the start of 2025 to fluff my would-be 欧宝娱乐 Reading Challenge, but also because I've been lately feeling a bit (more) semi-"depressed," in the sense that I just don't feel like doing stuff with people, which unfortunately partly means I don't feel like talking at work, when I'm in the middle of learning some cool new shit, but also more broadly having little interest in Christmas or New Year's, as rarely I do, because I just don't "get it" anymore, but anyway my point is this all matches the Vibe of Lin's (early) work very well.
(Fun fact: Apparently, Leave Society came out in 2021, which has to be bullshit because there's no way a) the novel is that old, and b) I haven't read it since that year!)
September 1, 2014
Uneven. Which I don't mean as a bad thing, really. Some of the stories in this collection are incredible, feel "brand new" even and are excitingly fresh to read. Some of the moments in some of the stories are are unparalleled in their originality and in their aptness for depicting whatever it feels like to be a "person" at times. But then some stories meander, some take the whole "plotless" thing way too far, some are just plain uninteresting. But even those have flashes of brilliance.
Seems like Tao Lin is best at writing closely to one character or to a relationship between two. The story "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" (cool title, right?), about Greg, who "[felt] that he was doomed in small but myriad ways", who lives by himself, spends time drinking coffee and watching the history channel, who eventually gets a job at a library and goes with some kids to "roll" some other kid's house (throw toilet paper all over), is wonderful, probably my favourite. Lin gets this kind of quiet loneliness and mundane suffering just right. Same with "Sasquatch", in which Chelsea works at Denny's and struggles with social anxiety. Of Chelsea's college education: "unassimilated and separate and dully stimulating as tropical fish" and of an unspoken awkward subject between her and her father: "like a thing that was large and trembled when approached."
The stories that don't work have moments like this, but they just feel, either too ambitious, or they lack the claustrophobia that makes the others work so well, a claustrophobia of being stuck inside one's own fucked-up head. There is also a peculiar writing style Lin takes on sometimes, for instance in "Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow": "People talked. They said, "there's this rumour..." Then they pointed at something that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted." It just felt, to me, so unclear in what was trying to be achieved (if anything, or maybe that was the point).
Bed reads like a collection of literary experiments. Like experiments, some fail, some work out, some reach satisfying conclusions, some don't but didn't need to. The fact that all of it feels so original is what makes it worth the read. Something about the less captivating stories makes the collection feel intimate, as if Tao Lin has something to convey, and will only convey it in his language. He's worth listening to, I think.
Seems like Tao Lin is best at writing closely to one character or to a relationship between two. The story "Suburban Teenage Wasteland Blues" (cool title, right?), about Greg, who "[felt] that he was doomed in small but myriad ways", who lives by himself, spends time drinking coffee and watching the history channel, who eventually gets a job at a library and goes with some kids to "roll" some other kid's house (throw toilet paper all over), is wonderful, probably my favourite. Lin gets this kind of quiet loneliness and mundane suffering just right. Same with "Sasquatch", in which Chelsea works at Denny's and struggles with social anxiety. Of Chelsea's college education: "unassimilated and separate and dully stimulating as tropical fish" and of an unspoken awkward subject between her and her father: "like a thing that was large and trembled when approached."
The stories that don't work have moments like this, but they just feel, either too ambitious, or they lack the claustrophobia that makes the others work so well, a claustrophobia of being stuck inside one's own fucked-up head. There is also a peculiar writing style Lin takes on sometimes, for instance in "Insomnia for a Better Tomorrow": "People talked. They said, "there's this rumour..." Then they pointed at something that was happening in the distance. They shrugged. Itched their forearms. They were easily distracted." It just felt, to me, so unclear in what was trying to be achieved (if anything, or maybe that was the point).
Bed reads like a collection of literary experiments. Like experiments, some fail, some work out, some reach satisfying conclusions, some don't but didn't need to. The fact that all of it feels so original is what makes it worth the read. Something about the less captivating stories makes the collection feel intimate, as if Tao Lin has something to convey, and will only convey it in his language. He's worth listening to, I think.
August 10, 2016
I got this book at a library sale for 50 cents and for some reason expected a lot from it. Maybe because it was next to a Joan Didion book.
And I really wanted to like this... Lin does some things very well. Instead of just stating emotions, he (usually) shows them through actions. He isn't afraid to write about states of mind that most of us don't want to dwell on -- boredom, depression, apathy. He notices details. And he's only a little older than me and has published tons of books, so he must be doing something right.
But I hated this. I couldn't get through the whole thing, so I guess I'll never know how just much I hated it. Lin doesn't bother to set scenes. The characters are always predictably sad and self-absorbed. And then there are sentences like this: "All of the moody emptiness inside of them swelled and joined, and then esconced them, like bubbles, and there, inside, they floated - the qualmish, smoked-out bodies of them, stale and still and upside-down." That's worse than reading my angsty teen diaries.
At least in those diaries I wasn't trying to impress readers with my astute (/shallow) observations of human behavior. Let's see... I'm having trouble finding a great example ... but here's one: "Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true - life wasn't supposed to be incredible after all. Life wasn't some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once." Blegh, that just does nothing for me.
And I really wanted to like this... Lin does some things very well. Instead of just stating emotions, he (usually) shows them through actions. He isn't afraid to write about states of mind that most of us don't want to dwell on -- boredom, depression, apathy. He notices details. And he's only a little older than me and has published tons of books, so he must be doing something right.
But I hated this. I couldn't get through the whole thing, so I guess I'll never know how just much I hated it. Lin doesn't bother to set scenes. The characters are always predictably sad and self-absorbed. And then there are sentences like this: "All of the moody emptiness inside of them swelled and joined, and then esconced them, like bubbles, and there, inside, they floated - the qualmish, smoked-out bodies of them, stale and still and upside-down." That's worse than reading my angsty teen diaries.
At least in those diaries I wasn't trying to impress readers with my astute (/shallow) observations of human behavior. Let's see... I'm having trouble finding a great example ... but here's one: "Lately, they were always reassuring each other that nothing was wrong; and probably it was true - life wasn't supposed to be incredible after all. Life wasn't some incredible movie. Life was all the movies, ever, happening at once." Blegh, that just does nothing for me.
December 6, 2008
Tao Lin, Bed (Melville House, 2007)
Eighties fiction still lives, and lives large, in the work of Tao Lin. These stories are eighties fiction writ large, but with slightly more contemporary settings to explore those same eighties-fiction themes (restlessness, alienation, ennui, and the like among the twentysomething generation). The big problem with eighties fiction, of course, was how unsatisfying it was; it takes all the angst of existential literature, but fails to inject any of the timelessness one expects after reading the finest existential works. Not that this necessarily has to be a bad thing; if you're fond of the big names in eighties fiction, especially those who were most associated with the trend (McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Janowitz are the Big Three, but one could also rope in just about anyone who got a volume of short stories published by Vintage Books between 1983 and 1989), you'll probably find quite a comfortable home in Tao Lin's fiction. If, however, you always gravitated towards the authors who were constantly pushing the eighties-fiction boundaries (Vanderhaeghe, Chabon, Ethan Canin, chaps like that), then this will likely feel like an underinflated retread. I chose to think of it as a nostalgia trip; interesting, but not necessarily something I'm going to need to revisit for another decade or so. ***
Eighties fiction still lives, and lives large, in the work of Tao Lin. These stories are eighties fiction writ large, but with slightly more contemporary settings to explore those same eighties-fiction themes (restlessness, alienation, ennui, and the like among the twentysomething generation). The big problem with eighties fiction, of course, was how unsatisfying it was; it takes all the angst of existential literature, but fails to inject any of the timelessness one expects after reading the finest existential works. Not that this necessarily has to be a bad thing; if you're fond of the big names in eighties fiction, especially those who were most associated with the trend (McInerney, Bret Easton Ellis, and Janowitz are the Big Three, but one could also rope in just about anyone who got a volume of short stories published by Vintage Books between 1983 and 1989), you'll probably find quite a comfortable home in Tao Lin's fiction. If, however, you always gravitated towards the authors who were constantly pushing the eighties-fiction boundaries (Vanderhaeghe, Chabon, Ethan Canin, chaps like that), then this will likely feel like an underinflated retread. I chose to think of it as a nostalgia trip; interesting, but not necessarily something I'm going to need to revisit for another decade or so. ***
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