MixedJacobinLeave Society trades irony for ideas: by understanding domination, Lin suggests, one can begin to escape it ... It is a testament to Lin’s skills as a novelist that all of this comes off as only mildly annoying. Leave Society presents Li’s breakthroughs as genuine insights, but it anchors its didacticism in well-drawn characters who are more than simply mouthpieces for the novel’s ideas. Li’s parents are particularly vivid ... Leave Society succeeds as a family novel. But it also wants to be a novel of ideas, which is where it falters. Lin spends large chunks of the book attempting to explain the problems of society, but his critique overlooks the real structures of domination ... Leave Society is blind to economic structures, preferring a vague New-Agey critique of \'domination\' that elides concrete forms of economic exploitation. There’s a difference, in other words, between criticizing \'dominator society\' and criticizing capitalism ... Leave Society seems unwilling to connect the misery around Li to the domination that produces it. As a result of its shallow critique, the novel misses the ways that Li remains ensnared in society ... the novel’s inattention to economic structures leaves it unable to see how much its fantasy of escape resembles the status quo.