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It doesn't often happen that a debuting writer displays not only irrepressible talent but also the ability to undermine the conventions of fiction and set off in new directions. Tao Lin, who is 24, does it with the simultaneous release of his first novel, Eeeee Eee Eeee, and a story collection called Bed. Even before these books came out, though, Lin's blog, Reader of Depressing Books, and his prolific publishing in online lit mags had earned him a reputation as part of a new wave of writers who don't just throw occasional mentions of the Internet into their fictions, but understand the Web's potential as a literary medium in and of itself.

That said, Lin's writing is as stimulating and exciting in bound form as it is online. In Eeeee Eee Eeee he discovers original content and form partly by being faithful to his context. Born in 1983, Lin belongs to the generation that reached adulthood just after Internet use became ubiquitous and roughly contemporaneously with the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath. His novel's characters, mostly in their 20s, inhabit the contemporary American landscape of strip malls, paranoia, youth drift, and looming apocalypse.

Lin doesn't play these things up. His young characters are matter-of-fact about the state of affairs. But it's refreshing to encounter a writer who has digested this reality and speaks its language, instead of trying to depict it using the same psychology and paradigm (the grand, realistic, linear narrative) with which the novel has been hobbling along for more than a hundred years.

Unlike much commercial literary fiction, Lin's work is not about straining self-importantly to paint a tapestry of American or global life, nor is it exactly about plumbing interior abysses (though existential and philosophical questions get full treatment). It is even less about a redeeming, Bend It like Beckham-style multicultural vision. Lin's parents were born in Taiwan, but the immigrant story is nearly absent from the author's novel and appears only obliquely in his short fiction. Lin's writing is about voice and experience -- and an attempt to communicate both in language that is as free of dissembling as possible.

Eeeee Eee Eeee's protagonist Andrew is an authorial alter ego who delivers pizzas while dreaming of connecting with a friend's sister, Ellen. But a potentially conventional love story becomes something far more idiosyncratic and funny. Like a medieval courtly lover, Andrew does more fantasizing than anything else; when he gets near Ellen, he constantly second-guesses himself, his various neuroticisms and anxieties tripping him up.

Lin subverts reality by using fauna -- mostly mammals -- as characters. Bears, dolphins, moose, and hamsters, as well as aliens, appear to converse and share experiences with the humans in the book, particularly Ellen and Andrew. These creatures often lead the characters under trapdoors, into labyrinthine worlds of tunnels that end at cliff edges, and they often express themselves in uncannily meaningful onomatopoeic pronouncements. As when humans sigh or groan, the animal sounds, while somewhat cryptic, seem more genuinely expressive than anything stated in our rhetoric-plagued language. (The novel's title comes from the dolphin utterance "Eeeee eee eeee.")

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