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Taipei
by Tao Lin
Vintage Books
Tao Lin is a young American writer, born in 1983 to Taiwanese parents. His new novel, Taipei, has his plainest title, but it's also his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter.
It's terse and neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures. At its lesser moments, it's hapless, like a poorly lighted mumblecore movie.
The novel is about Paul, a media-savvy young novelist in Brooklyn who superficially resembles Lin. He and his girlfriend, Erin, are blanks in skinny jeans. They take drugs to feel authentic or, indeed, to feel anything. They live-tweet bad movies or film themselves having sex.
"He felt like a digression that had forgotten from what it digressed" is a typical utterance here. If you were to turn Taipei into a word cloud, you'd end up with adjectives such as "stranded," "disengaged" and "fetal"; verbs such as "dispersed" and "cringing"; and past participles such as "alienated," "muffled," "depleted" and "doomed".
Lin's is an easy style to mock, and sometimes he approaches self-parody. But he casts a spell in Taipei. (The title comes from Paul's occasional visits to the city, where his parents live.) Paul and Erin's lives are lived on drugs and, as so many of our existences are now, on their MacBooks.
They constantly refresh their Twitter and Gmail accounts. Smartphone texts are scrutinised for minute layers of meaning. Links to blogs are a form of social currency.
Two things move Taipei beyond being merely a drug-sodden and lightly journalistic novel about how New York's 21st century literary set flowers now. One is Lin's deftness with what I'll call emotional close-up work. Not much happens in this book; it's about flickers of perception, flickers that the author catches as if they were fireflies.
This fluid novel also posits that the online world is more addictive, more mind-bending and perhaps more destructive than anything you will find in a pharmacy or buy from a dealer. Almost all of this novel's metaphors and similes emerge from the author's experience of the internet and his sense of the way it is colonising consciousness.
Paul thinks of "the backs of his eyelids as computer screens." When he wakes in the morning, he feels his memories downloading into his mind, like PDF files. Lin's a social novelist, writing about young men and women who are largely anti-social. He delivers chilly scenes of winter.
The New York Times


'Taipei' by Tao Lin

Lifestyle

Culture

Books

Tao Lin is a young American writer, born in 1983 to Taiwanese parents. His new novel, Taipei, has his plainest title, but it's also his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter.
