This novel shows great promise of what is to come from this author and his generation. It is a pause before the storm of disaster and adulthood, a final clearheaded glimpse of youth before it is ravaged and weathered by age.
Sam has been arrested twice for shoplifting, and the following scene takes place several weeks after his second release from jail. Walking around with Robert, Sam recognizes someone he shared a cell with. Sam recounts to Robert that "the young Asian" was funny, and they decide to follow him. As they trail him, Sam and Robert laugh together, not at the young Asian in particular but at their own obscene ideas about him. After a few minutes the young asian realizes he is being followed and he confronts Robert and Sam, saying, "I didn't rape my sister, two guys raped my sister, ask anyone, ask one of my friends," and the scene ends.
I found this silencing and disturbing in the best kind of way, like, oh here we are "mere children" "fucking around" in a city, ha ha, ha, which shifts deftly in tone toward a darker more menacing reality of, "oh, not everyone in the world is fucking around." As a reader I felt deeply affected by this, and I was only a witness to a witness, to a witness. Just as in the greatest Greek tragedies, the real bloodshed happens offstage, it does not have to happen on the page for its reverberations to shake the reader.
Essentially, the reader of "Shoplifting from American Apparel" is a voyeur, preying upon characters who are voyeurs. Beneath a patina of isolation and ennui the innocence of these characters remains. They are intact, untouched, half members of the world at large. They are without a doubt divorced from childhood and adolescence, their remembrances of it are the most obvious proof that it is something they have lost, something behind them. Yet the characters remain outsiders to the kingdom of adulthood, they are part-time workers, scabs, without benefits or burdens carried by full-fledged citizens of adulthood.
Labels: literary review, novela, shoplifting from american apparel, tao lin