Stylistically, the book is artful, even radical ... Despite, or perhaps because of, its virtues, the novel doesn’t hold the reader in its thrall. It meanders, linking scenes of low-key bickering in a gentle ebb and flow of harmony and disharmony. It doesn’t seem to mind if you put it down ... But the novel has a vision, however cracked, an idea connected to its form, which is more than I can say for most books.
With its emphasis on the partnership model of gender relations, Leave Society often reads as a veiled attempt to redress Lin’s past failures, particularly his abuses of power, in relationships ... As part of his efforts at self-betterment, Li tries to mediate between his parents, as well as improve his own relations with them ... These scenes are elegantly structured, with Li’s meditations guiding the reader through the delicately shifting dynamics among the three of them, like a particularly sensitive weathervane ... While the language in Leave Society remains stark in places—Lin’s descriptive skills are greatly inferior to his ability to capture mood and generate humor through dialogue—there is a subtlety to his observations that feels like a progression ... To develop one’s style so extensively, and with such success, over four books is no mean feat, a testament to Lin’s fastidious editing process. Many of the ideas offered up in Leave Society are murky, bordering on conspiracy theory ... What is interesting in Leave Society, however, is not the truth or falsity of its arguments—this is marketed as a work of fiction, after all—but how such arguments inflect character ... The final sentence of Leave Society [is] “Li took a leaf' ... On my first reading of Leave Society, I did not know what, if anything, to make of the homophone 'leaf' and 'leave.' On the second reading, when I was better accustomed to Lin’s humor and his delight in multiplicity, it seemed to me both metaphorical and literal, playful and quite serious, a brilliant, almost perfect ending.
If Lin’s earlier books felt voiced by a human resigned to becoming an automaton, then this one speaks in a voice of resistance, albeit a deluded one ... The generous read is that Lin’s poking fun at the half-baked ontological musings of a dude who’s taken way too much acid. But my sense is that Lin expects readers to give Li’s theory of the 'overmind' serious consideration ... For this kind of novel to work, however, the tensions usually generated by plot must be replaced by internal ones, and the novel’s ideas must be stimulating enough to sustain a reader’s interest. Unfortunately, here, there’s nothing to push up against Li’s zealotry, or to suggest that his druggy epiphanies are anything but profound ... By the end of the novel, Li has fallen in love with Kay ... I’m happy for them, though less so for Lin’s readers. At one point earlier on, Li concludes that conflict isn’t 'necessary for art.' Leave Society suggests he might reconsider.
The first sentence of almost every chapter contains at least one number, often several, like a medical record: 'Thirty tabs of LSD arrived on day thirty-five.' This kind of prose can be elegant; it can also feel like dieting ... But it’s most interesting to consider the book’s flat affect as a curious, sidewise effect of Li’s linguistic relationship to his parents ... There is a translated quality to this kind of writing, as if Lin were rendering Mandarin word for word; in fact, given Li’s propensity for audio recordings, this is likely exactly what happened ... the effect he’s created is a kind of fastidious plotlessness, one whose accuracy to life, affected or not, has the ambivalent virtue of being, like life itself, mostly boring. If you prefer, we can regard boringness as a perfectly neutral aesthetic category. Even so, it’s not a reason that most people read novels ... The prose is as sedate as ever ... not the first time Lin has relied on an autobiographical sex partner to inject narrative energy into his characteristically enervated novels ... Li’s relationship with Kay gives his novel not just an ending but a happy one: the pair decides to relocate to Hawaii, which counts as 'leaving society' for two New Yorkers. The not-good news is that this ending neatly ties together the romantic notions of aboriginality and womanhood that have sustained Li’s belief in 'partnership' throughout the book ... There is an astonishing naïveté here, on Li’s part, if not Lin’s; these sections of the book read like The Da Vinci Code. Li spends the entire novel learning to revere women as 'the ultimate metaphor for nature.' No wonder he can’t help worrying that his girlfriend is a plot device ... It’s easier to leave society than to let your mother be a whole person, and not some infantile ideal. To anyone who would see in that relationship the cosmic echoes of a peaceful egalitarianism, I would simply say: call her.
... rather subtle, almost subdued ... Leave Society often feels like a catalog of bodily developments, a dossier of setbacks, cures, and false diagnoses ... The resulting style possesses a hypnotic banality, or a form of 'dream accuracy,' as Li calls it at one point. Lin’s language is spare but carefully selected, bristling with radiant strangeness. Some of the effect comes from a different sort of selection ... Suddenly—and with great delight—we realize that Leave Society is as much a novel about Li’s re-socialization as it is about his period of self-imposed isolation.
Leave 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.
Those hoping for a more traditional narrative like Tao Lin’s 2013 Taipei, in which he captured the highs and lows of his character Paul’s young marriage in a cringe-inducing level of detail, may be disappointed. Fortunately, the same level of lacerating honesty in Taipei is present in Leave Society, which keeps the narrative compelling. (Despite the autofiction tendencies of his work, one never has to worry about Lin attempting to paint his protagonists in a flattering light.). More than that, Leave Society introduces the reader to two of the most endearing literary characters in recent memory: Li’s parents, simply referred to as Li’s mom and Li’s dad—and their beloved family dog, Dudu, who serves up a great deal of comic relief ... Li’s research in Leave Society indicates we have come close to diagnosing our 21st century malady. But there remains another distinct possibility, one Tao Lin has always been skilled at reminding us of in his fiction: that those pervasive feelings of loneliness, of being constantly ill-at-ease and second guessing every unregulated emotion, might simply be the status quo in a technology-driven era that has finally commodified human connection.
Lin’s new novel blends metafiction with commentary on modern medicine, with mixed results ... Li’s interactions with his parents are unpredictable; the rest of this novel, however, feels oddly detached. Ambitious in some places and quotidian in others.
The underwhelming story of a Lin-like New York City novelist facing a crossroads ... Much of the action and descriptions are banal, and aside from the romance, this feels a bit too detached and devoid of emotion for a book ostensibly about learning to live. Lin’s fans might appreciate this, but it doesn’t offer anything new.
