In 1944, in exile from Nazi Germany, Theodor Adorno began writing Minima Moralia. Playing on the title of an ethical treatise attributed to Aristotle, Adorno’s book takes up the fundamental question of modern ethics: How do we live meaningfully in a world built on exploitation and barbarity? A pessimist, Adorno refuses to offer easy comforts — or any comforts at all. Everything from high culture to the way that people close doors is implicated and degraded by capitalist modernity. “Wrong life,” Adorno concludes, “cannot be lived rightly.”

Adorno wrote Minima Moralia in Los Angeles, and it’s hard not to see some of the book’s bleakness as a reaction to the rabid optimism of his adopted homeland. The idea that life can’t be lived rightly is foreign to us; Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans have a “lively faith in the perfectibility of man . . . they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement.” Even Americans who have become disillusioned with the national project tend to imagine a way for themselves to live meaningfully outside it: our most enduring literary fantasies — Henry David Thoreau on Walden Pond, Huck Finn on the river, Jack Kerouac on the road — are of escape.

We can see a contemporary version of this fantasy in Leave Society, the new novel by Tao Lin. Leave Society tracks four years in the life of Li, a thirtysomething writer who shuttles between New York and Taipei, takes drugs, and looks at the internet. This will sound familiar to anyone who’s read Lin’s other novels, which work in the same autofictional mode. Yet Leave Society marks a significant break from his past work.