Taipei by Tao Lin – review Jul 21st 2013, 09:00
Tao Lin's tale of a New York writer on tour is both ultra-hip and substantial
The GChat-honed style of the American-Taiwanese writer Tao Lin signals suspicion not only of cliche but also the effort required to avoid it: the last line of his new novel, his British debut, both tugs the heartstrings and rolls the eyes when it tells us the main character "felt 'grateful to be alive'".
Like his theme – the existential crises of NYC hipsters – and his canny way with a publicity stunt (he funded his last book with an online auction of shares in the unwritten manuscript), this mix of irony and sincerity hardly pleases everyone, though it has earned Lin as many fans as haters, not least among the voluble constituency of readers registering a protest vote against the pieties of better-mannered lit-fic.
In Taipei, we follow party-hopping, Xanax-necking writer Paul as he drifts from one awkward relationship to the next, ignoring voicemail warnings from his publisher not to get high before readings on a cross-country book tour, and generally goofing around. In Louisiana, he pretends to be a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, vox-popping locals on whether they think Darth Vader will die in the next Harry Potter film; on a visit to his parents in Taiwan, he drops acid in a McDonald's to video the results on his MacBook.
With a neat line in offbeat analogy, Lin's writing here is more intricate – even beautiful – than you might expect, and as a portrait of an internet-shaped psyche, it's unmatched. When Paul first meets his wife, he reads "all four years of her Facebook wall… one night looking at probably 1,500 of her friends' photos to find any she might've untagged." In bed, he notices that her eyes "seemed to be tightly closed, which seemed like 'not a good sign', as he'd read on her blog – or somewhere – that she liked sex with 'a lot of eye contact'".
Lin is often compared to Bret Easton Ellis, and as with Ellis, you could read him as an anatomist of culture, or merely its symptom, but Taipei delivers more than enough satisfaction to make the choice needless.
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