Leave Society

by Tao Lin

A bold portrait of a writer working to balance all his lives—as an artist, a son, and a loner. A VINTAGE ORIGINAL.

In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn't know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds—year by year, over four years—he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether?

In his most recent work, Tao Lin delivers an engrossing and hopeful novel about life, fiction, and where the two blur together that builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance. Exploring everyday events and scenes—waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals—while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin spins the ordinary into something monumental, and shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, Novels, Literary Fiction, Literature, American, Unfinished

368 pages, Paperback

First published August 3, 2021

About the author

Tao Lin posts on Substack and lives in Hawaii.

Reviews

[Tao · Rating 5 out of 5]

My fourth novel and first novel in eight years.

[Mike Andrelczyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leave Society reminded me in a gentle psychedelic-like way to pay attention to my health and diet, care for, and appreciate loved ones, learn more about prehistorical cultures, philosophies and religions, revisit the theories of people like Terence McKenna, try not to worry about death, continue drawing mandalas, making art and writing, read more nonfiction and non-mainstream scholarly articles and books, remember / pay attention to how complex the world is and be in awe of the mysterious nature of the universe and other things. I appreciated learning about, and being reminded of things I knew about but had forgotten, that I’d be interested in reading more about. There’s an effective juxtaposition of destructive surrealness of modern life via “breaking” news segments and observations and the intuitive power of dreams and imagination. Great characters / writing about family and pets specifically the main character’s parents and dog Dudu - who might be my favorite character in the novel. Lin employs inventive, playful adverbs and syntax. Enjoyed the meta aspect of writing about writing and process of writing and editing. Leave Society was ultimately a hopeful
book and often funny and was enjoyable, entertaining and thought-provoking - which is, in my opinion, all you can ask for from a book.

[F · Rating 1 out of 5]

It is unbelievable that something so banal and inane gets published. The writer's narcissistic endeavour of disguising his incredibly mundane and privileged life in a 'novel' fails spectacularly. Instead of fighting against alienation, revelling and indulging in it seems to be the chosen mode of living. The autistic, alienated and insightless way of communicating, pages and pages of detailing useless self-absorbed new-agey self-improvement quests is mind-numbing. Not for one second does Tao Lin aka the protagonist stop to think that he himself, and not society, might be the problem.
Plus the endless dissociative rants on nutrition fads, supplements, breathing exercises, obscure theories on society are not only infuriating but a sad testimony of a person who's given up any attempt at understanding his fellow man, being pathologically and narcissistically mired in his own broken and liberal individualist subjectivity...

[a____ · Rating 3 out of 5]

There’s a Chinese saying - it’s easier to change a dynasty than a personality. The author’s personality is of a 14 year old who sees Terence McKenna as serious reference, dwells in reddit-like conspiracy theories and harasses his family with his google-doctor pseudo-science. If you’re wondering what’s the life of a grown man-child who buys drugs with his parents money this is it..

[Tao Lame · Rating 1 out of 5]

i wrote a poem about 'leave society' [apologies to all the tao lin followers/apologists]

leave society
is all about tao lin
once again
more & more
me me me
not to mention
lotsa lotsa
me byproducts
it is an astonishing
'tour de me'
a 'me-thology'
kinda like a blog
only worse
i wanted to like
leave society
instead i left
the 'novel'
somewhere

@tao_lame

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

To every person who has suffered the horror of chronic insomnia, to every insomniac everywhere, even those for whom "nothing ever works," this is the book for you. Just start reading it and within a few pages, you will quickly be transported to the restful sleep your body craves. Thanks to Tao Lin, my lifelong insomnia has been cured. From now on I will keep this book by my bedside, knowing that without drugs or complicated therapy, I can fall asleep in just minutes thanks to his lulling prose. The author may be the biggest enemy of wokeness in America: if you're a terrible insomniac, 4chanately you now can read this book--if only for a little while--and you will be sleeping alt right.

[Cynthia Chiang · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was so tedious it was hard to finish. The hero should be interesting because he is a misfit with unconventional ideas about drugs, relationships, science, medicine, etc. but he was like a boring elderly professor droning on in a class lecture -- he is fascinated in the material and doesn't realize the students are yawning and looking at their phones .

[Samantha Hohmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most unusually hopeful book I’ve read in a long time.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Li stared out his window at the ocean, thinking about his microbiome. It was hard to change his microbiome because the first microbes to colonise his body had formed biofilms – microbial communities protected by self-produced polymer matrices. The past was like a biofilm, he though experimentally. It couldn’t be destroyed or suppressed. It had to be replaced gradually, with emotion-charged information, story-embedded ideas, memorable stories.'

4.5 – and officially my favourite from Tao Lin. His stuff is an acquired taste, usually lovelier when you give it another shot. I read Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for the first time when I was still in highschool, and it didn't leave much of an impression on me; but when I flipped through it again after I found my old copy in my parent's house (like almost a decade later?), I was heart-fucked and grossly emotional. I prefer 'Leave Society' to Taipei . It's almost like a more refined, upgraded version of that . I finished reading 'Leave Society' a while ago but didn't remember to post a review. I kept thinking about the book long after reading it, and I plan to give it another read in a few months time/more.

I don't tend to pick up 'autofiction' as it's not a genre I like enough. Read Murakami's most recent novel earlier in the year. That one flirts with the autofiction genre very badly; a shocking disappointment. Tao Lin's novel surprised me. I had very low expectations going in, and am gladly surprised. Perhaps, I'll read more autofiction now?

'Li recognised the tone from when Mike had said, “We aren’t going to Whole Foods,” and realised he’d inaccurately thought Mike had used it specifically on him. Calmed by the realisation, Li remembered he’d used the same tone on their parents for most of his life, that he still struggled to avoid it, and that it was the tone their parents usually used on each other.'

'There’s a Chinese saying – it’s easier to change a dynasty than a personality.'

There's so much more that I could go on about the novel, but because I read it very quickly, I want to give it a second reading before writing a proper/full review. Might even compare it to Woolf and/or Moshfegh (to a certain extent) in my future, fuller review. A very easy read. Also, not in the mood to write proper reviews recently. Been reading more, and reviewing less. I love, love, love the narrative style, and how Tao Lin uses or rather translates Mandarin Chinese in such a direct, personal and playful way. The novel made me feel weird and fuzzy. Also, (an obviously popular opinion) Dudu is an absolute star in it.

'Let’s bicker at home. It’s embarrassing in public.'

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read cognitive-behavioral therapy, Shoplifting from American Apparel, Richard Yates, and Taipei by Tao Lin. The first book I read by him was Shoplifting from American Apparel about 11 years from now, in 2010. The last book I read by him before this one was Taipei, which I read in 2013.

When I first started reading Tao Lin's writing in 2010, I was entranced by the novelty of it, the way that his online presence and computer-mediated communications affected his writing style and thoughts. I felt like that was no longer entrancing to me when I read Taipei in 2013, but it may have also became he felt more and more attention-seeking and meme-like to me, and those drug-fueled days he depicted seemed bleak and empty, full of a kind of numb despair.

I remember reading Taipei in maybe one or two days. I'm not someone who usually cares about "wasting days", as I don't view myself as some kind of efficiency-driven machine, but I definitely felt empty and wasteful after I read Taipei. What was the point to life? What was the point of reading? Why does anything matter if our worlds are mostly constructed in our heads anyway? Shouldn't we just try to make whatever is in our heads go as fast or as spaced-out as possible so that we get to the conclusion (death? or whatever happens) faster?

When I heard about Leave Society, I pre-ordered it because I felt like something had changed with Tao Lin, and I'm glad that I got it and got to read it. The writing is similar to his other works, but it's more thoughtful, more human, and grounded in a presentness that is life-affirming. It's not life-affirming in the kind of way that gets marketed a lot, which to me often feels hollow, fake, trying to sell me something, trying to manipulate me into believing something I don't actually believe. Rather, the book is life-affirming in a slow, boring, meditative way that makes me move slower and more calmly. I can feel myself becoming a snail. The book is easy to read, but it's also kind of slow, and an awkward conversation in the book can feel just as long as it might have actually happened. There's not much of an arc, and it feels like real life, which seems more and more acceptable for me to live.

I don't agree with all of his opinions, but I genuinely feel happy for Tao Lin. I felt happy reading about microfireflies, too, since I think I've seen them as a child, but I've never had any words to describe them, and they've always felt too weird or I've always been too forgetful (since I haven't seen them since I was a childhood) to ever try to write down what they're like.

[Abigail · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes cute, sometimes amusing, sometimes sad but mostly an absolute borefest. Never read something this narcissistic and lazy before. It's ridiculous that the writer expects the reader to care about any of this. 60% of the book is summaries of pseudoscientific garbage he reads. Other 40% is literally his diary. There are some cute passages mostly involving his parents and the dog but other than that, it is really bad. The prose has style but is a chore to read. Since a lot of this is just a transcription of conversations, a lot of it is also banal and meaningless. There were some parts where a particular conversation did make me feel a certain way but mostly, it's just people talking about fucking nothing.

There is no story. The writer even thinks this is a kind of a new invention by him. He spends so much time summarizing books he's read I'm surprised nobody's sued him for plagiarism. All the new agey stuff is intriguing at first, then mildly amusing and when he started talking about cancer and Parkinson's, it turned infuriating. The writer idolizes people like Terence McKenna and there is a part where he praises his girlfriend's period blood as natural and begins licking it. There's so much misinformation about ancient civilizations and history, read a real history book Tao. Not everything is bullshit though. He talks about the Plasmoid theory of the universe and about MKUltra which I found interesting.

All in all, an extremely boring novel. I don't recommend this unless you enjoy being preached to by somebody who Googles a lot and thinks he knows everything.

[Maria Bodin]

Läst för att förlagskunskapen gav i uppgift att läsa en engelskspråkig roman utgiven under året. Det bästa med den är att den är så lunkande och förutsägbar att stilen blir kvar i minnet. Jag var lite hjälpt av att liksom ha Lis familjs gräl närvarande nu under julhelgen, eftersom det fick mig att betrakta min egen familjs tjafs på samma avlägsna, korta sätt.

Men svårt att inte känna motstånd mot protagonisten, vilket gör läsningen frustrerande i längden. Påminner mig om alla eteriska, spexande pojkmän i min omgivning. Droppen var nådd när Li och Kay vilar kinderna mot frukt i slutet. Vill knacka han.

[Claire Hopple · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tao is one of the most influential writers of our time and I respect him immensely. This stark autofiction may help him self-actualize, but I prefer his forays into bears’ and elephants’ onomatopoeic exuberance and their underground worlds.

[D P · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder if this is my favorite book.

[Harold · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I would have liked this less if I didn't already 'know' Tao Lin through all his books and tweets, I'm interested in following his life at this point. Also we're similar ages so maybe going through similar developmental stages. I am also working to recover from society! (Particularly American society.)

Some good dry humor as always, which I love—

He couldn’t stop thinking they’d “stormed out” of the ideal dentist for their needs.

People in the distance were also flapping. Many Taiwanese adults and elders flapped.

…Li’s dad, who was known to push trash or food under furniture even when watched, grunting noncommittally when censured…

Celebrities on TV had said, “Milk: it does a body good” and “Got milk?,” and at school everyone had gotten milk.

He said Li’s mom had had three abortions between Mike and Li.
“And now we’ve had three dogs,” said Li’s mom.

They decided to say “Amazon” to refer to the jungle five times per time they referenced the corporation.

…nudging Dudu with his face while petting and sniffing her and saying “hair child,” “pig-dog,” and “very beautiful.”

They accompanied the dog as he sniffed and peed along a dirt road. Li said the dog was refreshing and commenting on websites on the dog internet.

“Dus” wasn’t a word in English; according to Urban Dictionary, it was an acronym for “driving under the shrimpfluence.”

Very personal, lots of details about the difficulties of his childhood (repeatedly collapsing lung, father going to prison, screaming at mother)

A large fraction of the book is Li bugging his parents to avoid modern medicine and chemicals

He and his parents frequently email each other while in the same apartment, which is interesting

I like how he uses the word "stoned" as a positive thing to work towards, meaning broadly to be more connected with reality, whether with the help of cannabis or not. He is happy that his parents seem to be getting more "stoned" as time goes on

Hawaii sounds amazing

I felt like the ending was maybe trying to be 'poignant' in a way that didn't land for me …can't recall now how his other books ended

Some exciting optimistic ideas about psychedelics and Terence McKenna's 'the mystery' and ways to live outside of dominator capitalism

And learned various cool things, such as an alternative way of writing dates relative to the beginning of agriculture, to give a better context to history. Specifically he mentions Merlin Stone's "After the development of agriculture" date system which is similar to the maybe more popular Holocene calendar — basically 0 H.E is 10000 B.C. … so 2021 A.D. is 12021 H.E. which I like a lot, much more interesting than starting at Christianity.

I hope he keeps documenting his journey, excited to learn what I can from him as I take my own journey!

Buncha quotes I highlighted on my kindle:

…5 percent of future U.S. cancers could result from “exposure to medical imaging.”

For four eons, life had been riveting and blissful. Earthlings had enjoyed nested cycles of flowing variety, linked in ancient webs of mutual benefit, before dying, usually in awe-saturated, euphoric shock, as perfect food for grateful others.

Li rested facedown on a tray table. Facedown on arms was probably his commonest sitting position so far in life. He liked its socially acceptable, portable, free privacy.

Li felt happy that he was happy and that it was making his mom happy.

Maybe health problems would end U.S. domination, weakening the country into a new kind of partnership society—a meek, in-turned place of diseased people caring for one another…

When he was seven, he’d blamed his parents for making his LEGO structure fall by vibrating the air with their voices…

He remembered Kathleen Harrison saying there was a phase near the end of her psychedelic trips when she practiced “mending”—thinking about people close to her, trying to understand them a bit more, considering what she could do for them, what she could say that she’d never said before.

As the trillions of microbes in his gut, brain, eyes, and other parts modulated his feelings, thoughts, and behavior with electrons and molecules, the billions of words he’d thought, said, read, heard, dreamed, and written, his internal literature, influenced him from the other direction.

“Got out of it,” sang Li one night after canceling a social interaction.

…millions of American children used amphetamines, which Taiwanese news viewed as a deadly menace, daily in the form of Adderall.

…from “confused struggle in a grim world” to “recovery toward a former harmony.”

The sun appeared to be the same size as the moon because, in an impressive coincidence, it was four hundred times larger and four hundred times farther away.

History would restart millennia later, as it seemed to have at least once before, from the stable, undegenerate substrate of wild humans, who were like a backup team and living library as the others ventured out of nature, into buildings, books, and screens.

He learned from a 2015 study that, out of awe, amusement, compassion, contentment, joy, love, and pride, it was awe, somewhat surprisingly, that had the strongest correlation with lower inflammation levels. He decided to feel and note awe or its intellect-grasped variation, wonder, at least once a day, which, with cannabis supplied and pain mostly gone, was easy.

…there might be places as unknowable to people as dreams were to electrons…

Aborigines seemed to naturally steward their environments into fecund forest-gardens, in which they lived in optimized symbiosis with thousands of life-forms, catalytically nourishing themselves over tens of millennia…

He enjoyed working most on holidays, when people were doing things that alienated him, making him feel closer to himself.

…he read that forests, mountains, seashores, and waterfalls had tens of thousands of anions per cubic centimeter, countrysides had a thousand, city parks five hundred, city streets fifty, air-conditioned rooms zero to twenty-five, and that below a thousand impaired cognition and slowed physical recovery.

…he’d realized his personality was influenced by his health; he’d been taciturn, monotone, and withdrawn for most of his life because that was what his body could muster.

“Hadn’t known how to take care of a child yet,” said Li’s dad.
“It’s good nothing happened,” said Li’s mom.
“Not too knowledgeable about taking care of a child,” said Li’s dad.
“At least I took care of him,” said Li’s mom.
“Can’t let him stand on the sink—it’s slippery,” said Li’s dad.
“Feet very slippery,” said Li’s mom.
“How old was I?” said Li.
“You were a baby,” said Li’s mom.
“Fell from so high,” said Li’s dad.

“Thought ‘I need friends’ while feeling unhappy,” he emailed himself, and, gaining some distance, felt a little better.

Were nightmares interrupted dreams? Most stories could seem nightmarish if they ended too early.

…Schopenhauer, who wrote “the greatest of follies is to sacrifice health for any other kind of happiness.”

…a sleep researcher who called sleep “a built-in physician” and dreams “an internal psychotherapist.”

…he functioned better, he knew, when he was in one social situation per five to eight days, but he was letting himself go longer.

“Imagination-bathing,” thought Li in bed that night. Maybe spending time in the imagination—dreaming, wondering, remembering, reading, making art—was inherently healing, like being in forests and other natural environments.

The Big Apple seemed to suck people out of countrysides and suburbs, out of other cities and countries, and toxify their blood and minds, sterilizing and dispiriting them.

Li read in Why We Sleep that people were sleeping two hours fewer than a century ago, cutting off the last fourth of nightly healing.

“When I die I will become everything”…

“Bad mood dissolves in nature,” he thought, swinging his vision across and into fractal montane verdure, feeling like he was scrubbing his eyeballs and parts of his mind clean.

…Zhuangzi, a student of Laozi, said, “How do you know that I don’t know the fish are happy?”…
…they invented the verb “Zhuangzi”—to present a larger perspective on a situation…

[Adam3million · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wtf actually very charming. I had some initial reservations about the prose, but on reading further realised that the prose is like the main character; awkward but earnest and consistently surprising. Through the idiosyncrasies and successive hyper-fixations, Tao Lin presents a character who is reflective and good-hearted, and who makes me want to be a better son. (Best work on parent/adult child relationships since Fathers and Sons?)

[Mayke Daniëls · Rating 2 out of 5]

Niet uitgelezen, maar heb ook geen zin meer. Hoe ik de zoektocht van de hoofdpersoon in het begin nog intrigerend vond, kan ik er nu geen chocola meer van maken. Er gebeurt vrij weinig in het verhaal, maar heel veel in dat koppie. Misschien gevalletje another place another time.

[Justin Chen · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

For die-hard fans only, I've read a Tao Lin novel years ago and enjoyed it (Taipei), and Leave Society feels like a pseudo-sequel, to the point I believe both novels are essentially autobiographical, documenting the daily (un)mundane of a very particular Taiwanese American individual.

Leave Society drew me in with its frank portrayal of a Chinese family that was dangling between two vastly different cultures—the depiction of the passive aggressiveness between the traditionalist parents and the westernized children (whether that is about language, tradition, or even the home remedy when one catches a cold) had me gasping at its relatability and accuracy (exactly how my family functions)—a very specific dynamic I don't often see written about in Western literature, especially in such an unflattering, unromanticized way.

Being an anecdotal narrative that is almost boring on purpose, connecting with the protagonist is key to a reader's enjoyment. I enjoyed Taipei immensely when I read it during university, because my then sense of identity (or lack of one) closely related to the novel's frenzied protagonist. Reading Leave Society in my mid-30s, it is evident Tao Lin is continuing to be adventurous while I have mellowed out, so the intense obsession over micro-dosing and experimental dieting just doesn't hold my interest.

This is a clear scenario where the author and the reader are no longer on the same wavelength; I can still appreciate objectively Leave Society's literary boldness, documenting a very particular way of life in all of its frustration and tedium, and Tao Lin remains one of the few authors who really captures the undercurrent of a cross-cultured Asian family, but I think I'll stick to his short form work in the future.

**This ARC was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Much appreciated!**

[Peter Schutz · Rating 5 out of 5]

thanks, Tao Lin, for sharing :)

hippy-consumerism; health-narcissism; arguing-with-your-parents; lsd-brain-damage; mysticism; galaxy-as-atom; autism; overmind; “lumine”



“At six a.m., Li woke sweating from a nightmare in which people didn’t believe him on glyophosate toxicity.”



**

Intellectual curiosity is an intense joy, a pitfall of which is to too readily share with others, at the risk of discovering, through their eyes, which are also your own, that what insights one has gleaned are not, after all, all that novel, or even insightful.

**
(found this in my notes today)

in which tao lin pretends his hippy-consumerism health-narcissism is the key to uncovering the mysteries to the universe.
unconvincing, but this is a novel, and as far as novels go it is majestically stylized, incisively, incisively written; as in, like an incisor. this book is a fucking tooth.

[michal k-c · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reject the rationalization of enchantment, rediscover wonder, leave society.

[John Pistelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

Leave Society, whose widely discussed imminence inspired me to revisit Tao Lin earlier this summer, has had an unusually generous reception for an experimental literary novel: a respectful landing in mainstream media, a cult following among an emergent subculture, and even admiring reviews in the right-wing press. With this broad appeal, it is—even though it really isn't, if you read it—the kind of American novel that used to be more common, a book of our time, a book every literate American read and wanted to discuss because it seemed somehow to explain ourselves to ourselves. Maybe something wasn't permanently lost to our literary culture, besides of course their irreplaceable individual talents, with the deaths of past masters like Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. Except that Leave Society is not much like Morrison nor even the often autobiographical Roth, because they wrote novels immersed in American history and public life, in the headlines—in short, novels about society, not the leaving of it.

Lin's individual books are parts of an evolving autobiographical whole, and Leave Society follows on from 2018's nonfictional Trip (which I have read) and the 2014 novel Taipei (which I haven't yet). Lin received the message "leave society" on psychedelics shortly after releasing Taipei, as recounted in Trip, yet instead of taking to a Romantic hermitage or to the Unabomber's cabin, he decides instead to exit our modern damage on an inner voyage, one that improves the outer world too when it's externalized as attentively cooperative behavior and beautifully ramifying literature. He alters his aesthetic: "He didn't want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction," like Shoplifting from American Apparel (2009).

Leave Society is still autofiction, albeit in the third person and about a Lin-like novelist named Li, but it does eschew "existentialism," Lin's label for the negative modern worldview emphasizing our alienation and isolation, our Heideggerean "thrownness" into a meaningless cosmos. Instead of his previous style—stark, affectless, stripped-bare prose—he proliferates creative coinages (like "languaging" above) throughout the novel, and produces surreally poetic descriptions like these:

In child's pose at the end of class, he synesthesiated perspiration as a crunchy, oceanic blare.

[…]

They sat on a barnacled, algaed square at the end of the tube, amid convolving water. Glimmering solar veils fell through the sky, which was partly dark with storm clouds.

The novel narrates about four years in Li's life and dwells particularly on his improving relationship with his parents over the course of four long annual visits to their home in Taipei, a city he finds closer to nature and less ruinously inorganic than New York, where he lives the rest of the year. He alters his diet and pressures—sometimes gently, sometimes not so gently—his parents to do the same; he likewise rejects most tenets of modern medicine and cures himself of ailments from tooth decay to ankylosing with psychedelic drugs, yoga, natural eating, and more humane and holistic thinking. His growing intimacy with his parents manifests itself undramatically in everyday acts of affection and communication, often mediated through the novel's scene-stealer, the family's toy poodle Dudu (see Timothy Wilcox for more canine analysis). With this homecoming to a family from whom he'd previously felt distant, he furthers what he calls his "recovery" from the damage of modern life; when he falls in love, late in the novel, with a New York neighbor and fellow writer named Kay Yoshida, his recovery progresses still further.

Leave Society also tells the story of its own composition, as Li uses both audio recording and intensive note-taking to capture his life as it happens, a mass of material he selects and re-arranges into the very book we read, with his parents providing comic input into their own representation. Yet this thread of the narrative never feels like a jokey postmodern gesture; instead, it deepens the novel's realism by showing us how it emerged from the very quotidian stuff of life it describes.

Li began to feel like he was in a realistic, many-scened, calmly mystical novel in which he and his parents were sympathetic, amusing characters.

For Lin, a convert to psychedelic goddess-worship and indigenism, the existential mood in literature is only another in a long line of violent, avaricious, masculinist "dominator" ideologies that conquered the planet when we started worshipping sky gods instead of earth goddesses and building cities where nature should freely flow. Worse than existential literature, for Lin, is modern science, with its profit-driven destruction of human health and nutrition, its pumping the environment full of toxins, and its erection of a totalizing medical edifice that only treats the insalubrious effects of its initial chemical insult with yet more poisonous chemicals.

To leave society is, first, to alter one's diet away from processed foods, refined sugars, and other inflammatory agents; second, to stop consuming licit and illicit non-psychedelic drugs, whether doctor-prescribed or street-acquired; third, to start taking psychedelic drugs; fourth, to research our way out of the scientistic-existential mindset and toward a healthier, saner vision. In Lin's view, knowledge of our primordially cooperative psychedelic matriarchal pre-civilization—a knowledge he derives from such dissident thinkers as Terence McKenna, Riane Eisler, and Marija Gimbutas—allows us to shape a new human narrative that will empower us to awaken from the nightmare of history into the beauty of the imagination:

It seemed egregious to have forgotten and auspicious to have remembered, changing the story's theme from "confused struggle in a grim world" to "recovery toward a former harmony."

Hence the conservative connotation of the word "recovery" even when used to describe so radical a hope. Our access to mass online communication—in the novel, Li regularly emails his mother even when she's in the next room—and the spread of debilitating chronic illness as a result of modern toxification both serve to get us out of our bodies and societies and onto the redemptive immaterial plane:

Humans everywhere were being nudged and shoved and pulled and lured away from matter, toward the increasingly friendlier dimension of the imagination—away from inflamed, deformed, poisoned bodies and the ad-covered, polluted outdoors, and into beds, books, computers, fantasies, dreams, memories, and art.

Because the imagination is more beautiful and complex than reality, like a novel or other work of art in relation to the world, literature itself becomes Lin's vehicle not only to escape society but to introduce imaginative ideas into society, ideas ramifying through other minds into new ideas in a feedback mechanism producing what the novel calls "emergent properties," complex births of better worlds within the world. Fiction is so powerful for Lin it can even travel through time:

Working on the novel daily over the next two and a half years, he would sometimes feel almost able to see the final draft, which from somewhere in the future was bidirectionally transmitting meaning and emotion, backward toward him and ahead to the end of his life.

I welcome such an ambitious spiritual mission for the novel in an era that can find no better uses for literature than depressingly pedagogical incitements to "empathy" or "critical thinking."

Thematically, Leave Society has an exciting untimeliness, at least for people who like their novels to challenge dominant ideology. I’m sure when Lin was writing it over the last few years, he couldn’t have known how a passage objecting to flu vaccinations—on the grounds that “there were safer ways to increase immunity than with shots containing” a long list of chemicals I won’t reproduce here—would read in 2021. Now more than ever, skepticism about the dictates of “science”—an epistemological process now swollen monstrously into a set of ever more unaccountable authoritative institutions—is for us what “heresy” was to the monotheist dominator societies Lin complains of. I’m grateful this book hasn’t been banned (yet) as “misinformation.”

I contested some of Lin's sources and conclusions in Trip, because I wasn't too impressed that Terence McKenna hallucinated a menacingly Malthusian lecture from a wisecracking mushroom who seems to have read the Georgia Guidestones. But under a novel's sign of the hypothetical, the virtual, and the make-believe, what Dean Kissick calls Lin's “n-dimensional Asian-futurist visionary romanticism” proves more persuasive, as scenes of filial affection, animal endearment, and inventive natural description lap gently over us in the wash of Lin's slow prose. Kissick links Leave Society to the "emergent property" of politically inscrutable spiritual youth movements that have embraced it and made Lin something of a cult hero:

The imagination as he describes it seems like a sort of heaven. As such, it mirrors other ascending spiritual movements of the past decade, from the popularity of shamanic ritual and ayahuasca ceremonies, on the West Coast in particular; to the revival of churchgoing among New York’s it girls and literary bratpack; to the cult of Angelicism (who notes, on his blog, “According to Leave Society, cosmology is kinda MKUltra, that is, what Badiou calls an ideology of finitude. In other words, any fear of extinction is just a default horror trope, and needs to be worked through”) or the nascent movement of “Network Spirituality,” which might be framed as a virtual heavenly community that rejects old models of individuality and reality. It’s in the imaginary realm, Lin suggests, that we can be free.

Similarly, writing in the conservative Washington Examiner, Alex Perez congratulates Lin for escaping the total "progressive" ideological consensus that dominates literature today and seeking not its opposite but another way of life entirely, yet one with a traditionalist resonance:

Leave Society is indeed about leaving a sick society, but more importantly, it is about reentering a different kind of society, the healthy society of family, love, and nature. Only through leaving, Lin seems to be saying, is one able to live.

Leave Society is in many respects a quintessential American novel. While I was reading it, I perused a dilapidated old paperback I found in a Little Free Library: The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (1965) by Tony Tanner, a study arguing that American writers from Emerson and Whitman through Stein and Hemingway to Salinger and Bellow disparage reason and elevate instead a child-like attitude of receptive unknowing:

It has shown itself, perhaps, too suspicious of the rational intellect, too disinclined to develop a complex reaction to society, too much given to extreme reactions, too hungry for metaphysics.

Yet for all that, Tanner salutes American literature for "its compassion and generosity…its reverent love for the world." So we might blame and praise Leave Society as well. And if Kissick finds it "Asian-futurist" instead of American, I suggest these aren't as easy to separate as they might appear. Emerson (who wrote of the "Over-Soul" as Lin writes of an emergent literary "overmind") read Vedic literature, and Pound invented American modernism by translating poetry from the Chinese and Japanese. It's no contradiction for a quintessentially American novel to be set mostly in Taipei and to hail east over west:

Despite four millennia of autocratic patriarchy, China hadn't fallen as deep into domination as the West, though, it seemed to Li. Confucianism hadn't violently spread across the planet. After Confucius, Daoist texts had revived archaic partnership ideas. Zhuangzi referred longingly to a time when people cared for their mothers, weren't aware they had fathers, and didn't think of harming one another. Daodejing, a five-thousand-word, poetry-collection-like book by Laozi, promoted the return to a former egalitarian society; viewed de, nature, as the most faithful expression of Dao; and called Dao, which seemed to be synonymous with change, the underlying creative, maternal source of everything.

The novel's final line, "Li took a leaf," alters the title's meaning from injunction to playful pun. Taking leave becomes taking leaf. Instead of literally leaving society, the novel suggests we build a new society of leaves, both "leaves of grass" (as our national-universal bard would say) and the leaves of books, through whose literary language we remake ourselves and our universe into worlds more pacific, more imaginative, and more beautifully strange.

[Ashley BW · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tao Lin is not a good novelist. A diarist, maybe. Record keeper, even. But he is not a good novelist.

I realize this is because his novel lacks almost any creativity. He writes exactly what happens--in sometimes painstaking detail, about a life that is not particularly interesting, with prose that is not particularly captivating. His book is only interesting in the way that it's fascinating to watch someone tweak so hard with health-related psychosis. But the fascination is passive, muted, detached from any skill or insight on the part of the author. The book is interesting in the way that it's interesting to watch a colony of ants descend upon a piece of food on the ground. I'm happy to stop and watch the ants for a moment, but I wouldn't want to read about them for 355 pages.

I decided to read this because Jiwoo (shoutout) had been reading it, and I realized I kept liking this guy's tweets. I thought they were bangers. Having read his book, I see his tweets in a new light. I don't like his tweets anymore.

If I had given up on reading this book way back when--instead of dabbling in it for almost 2 months--perhaps my review would not be so scathing. But I had to see it through. Like a gaper delay. In the end, I am appalled at this car-accident of a book. Actually no: a car accident would've been more interesting.

[Sam Rapkiewicz · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5, I have an intellectual crush on Tao Lin. I am obsessed with the way he portrays every day life on the page. He makes me feel how Knausgaard does except it’s funnier and quirkier. I found this book so beautifully endearing, sometimes I just wanted to cry because of how sensitive and intelligently perceived everything was. I loved the portrayal of Dudu. It reminded me of how I think of my cats.
It’s so rare to come across a book that makes you feel a deep sense of tenderness and awe and optimism. I feel like most “hopeful” books never strike me as deep enough to believe, but this did.
This struck me as a book about his parents and him mostly, and I thought the intricacies of family life were captured really charmingly.
I guess the .5 off is because Lin just writes about being a writer with basically no financial responsibility and whose only job it is to observe and write about his life, and sometimes I feel like his manner of writing about social and existential things is wasted on someone whose life is so entirely unrelatable at times lol

[ooeoeodsh · Rating 2 out of 5]

[edit for preface] my review is really bad, I liked this: https://www.bookforum.com/print/2803/... review a lot and I mostly agree with it. The only time I would suggest this book is if you have read Lin's previous works and are interested in him as a person or learning more about his personal life and upbringing.

was an avid fan of tao's previous work. However this one is quite a slog, and oftentimes I feel very distrustful of the claims he make. This book is presented as "meta-auto-fiction" in Tao's words, yet is filled with uncited claims by the narrator. It seems to me that this "auto-meta-fiction" is just a sneaky way to write a piece of non-fiction without needing to confirm sources or have any credibility!

I'm 1/5 into this book, but it seems doubtful that my main insight will change. When reading this, the only way I can get value out of it is to observe the narrator as an unreliable narrator. The problem is, I don't believe that was Tao's intention. If this book is good, it will be in spite of itself.

[edit for update] I got to the chapter Variations (~p210 of 284) after skipping to the end and reading the final chapter. I finally decided to give up on this. There are some things I like about it, it makes one neurotic just like the main character, and makes you question your own irrational thoughts. Other than this, I wasn't getting much out of this book and mainly felt frustrated with Tao and his character. This review (https://www.bookforum.com/print/2803/...) puts my thoughts into words better than I can.

[Kion You · Rating 5 out of 5]

“He didn’t want to specialize in embodying and languaging confused alienation anymore, as he had for a decade, writing existential autofiction. He didn’t want to forget that angle either. It seemed auspicious to have distrusted preconceptions, groups, and ideologies for so long. He had less to unlearn.”

Frank Guan called Tao Lin the first 'great male Asian author of American descent' like seven years ago and its probably still true. The neutral style/clarity/attention to precision carries over from Taipei and his previous works, but this new work focuses much more on his relationship with his parents, which is rendered with mundanity and tenderness and humor all at the same time. It just feels honest to the way families bicker and engage in constant micro-dramas of care. If Taipei was a novel about cities and technology, Leave Society feels like its antithesis, focused more on healing from the damage wrought by urbanization, chemical toxins, misinformation, and the like. Really good stuff, reading the novel felt nourishing in a detoxifying way, almost mirroring the narrator's own journey to detoxification.

[Donna Wetzel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thanks Goodreads for my copy of Leave Society by Tao Lin. I managed to finish this book, which I consider a great feat. It is an original book but so self obsessed, that it is difficult to get through. If the author's intention is to poke fun at a person who is all about eating healthy, yet abuses drugs and takes a variety of quack remedies, then he succeeded in being funny. But the book is much too long and redundant. The parents are classic enablers; afraid to confront their son for fear of losing him.

[Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book a lot and found it very relatable as someone who is also very interested in reducing toxicity (radiation, pharmaceuticals) and helping health issues (myself and others) via lifestyle and nutrition. I feel like some people would find the descriptions of the narrator and his parent's conversations/daily life maybe boring or repetitive, but I really enjoyed all the details and found the book inspiring and life affirming.

(Also, my mum is reading this book now and enjoying it)

[Noah · Rating 2 out of 5]

the main problem with this book is that Tao Lin has settled on an idea of goodness, and writing fiction isn’t its immediate ally. I don’t really like what this book does with document form, which in Taipei was buoyed by the raw, magical humor of Brooklyn. what’s good about this book is that Tao Lin is still good with narrativization, presenting information, pace, feeling; and furthermore his idea of the good is decent. Goes very near intelligence but is delimited elsewhere

[Levi · Rating 5 out of 5]

The word, “three,” including its common (and uncommon) variations (e.g., “thirty,” “thrice,” “third,” even, “triplicately”), and excluding such close-variations as, “thirteen,” “3A,” and “thirty-four,” (“thirty-three,” however, was counted, as one instance of three, and not two, despite the repeating threes; same with, "3:30") – these varied threes appear, if my tally is correct, 202 times throughout this novel, and this fact does not matter one bit, unless it does.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved the book. Laughed a lot. It was refreshing how A lot of ideas from non-fiction, McKenna’s food of the gods in particular (which I coincidentally read before this one), got imbued with more meaning. They got less bullet-pointy in my head.
Also, the characters were very lovable. I got really curious how Li’s Dad’s “Ayoo” sounded like.