Richard Yates

August 16, 2010
This slick yet affecting novel depicts the manically self-absorbed days and nights of “Dakota Fanning” and “Haley Joel Osment.” That the two share names with famous child stars, and that the title references a celebrated novelist, indicates our specific moment in time, but otherwise this is not a book “about” either the actors or the author. Born in 1983, Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel) portrays a generation unable to engage and left lost, lonely, and dangerously obsessive as a result. Gmail chat and text message appear in heavy rotation, as the young lovers become more and more incapable of anything beyond their melancholic fixation with each other. The prose is rhythmic and lean, but strangely captivating, ultimately serving to echo the lack of interest the characters seem to have in anything other than themselves. Following them proves disconcerting and exhausting, especially as nothing keeps happening. Lin’s sensibility is hip and ironic, but also feels ominously clairvoyant. As the author himself has become something of an icon to the very generation he portrays, one gets the sense that the disaffected youth are in on something the rest of us can only read about; given how bleak that world appears, reading about it feels relentless enough.

September 1, 2010

In this experimental work named after a novelist, the debt owed to Yates comes mostly in terms of theme--with its broken homes and eating disorders it updates the suburban ennui of an earlier generation. Lin (Shoplifting from American Apparel) presents the story of a relationship between a 22-year-old New York writer (Haley Joel Osment) and a troubled, underage New Jersey high school girl (Dakota Fanning)--a relationship that takes place as much by email and chat as it does face to face. For all of the publisher's attempts to promote the novel as a provocative tale of illicit love, the couple's relationship is striking mostly for its sheer ordinariness. It's not helped by the stilted, deadpan mode of speech the characters often employ, which tends to distance the reader. VERDICT Lin appears to be trying to make points about identity, the media-fueled myths people create of their lives, and the existential emptiness of the suburbs but seems unwilling or unable to develop any of these ideas. More gimmicky than insightful, this work leaves the reader ultimately wondering what the point is.--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, North Andover, MA

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