Taipei

From one of this generation's most talked about and enigmatic writers comes a deeply personal, powerful, and moving novel about family, relationships, accelerating drug use, and the lingering possibility of death.
Taipei by Tao Lin is an ode--or lament--to the way we live now. Following Paul from New York, where he comically navigates Manhattan's art and literary scenes, to Taipei, Taiwan,  where he confronts his family's roots, we see one relationship fail, while another is born on the internet and blooms into an unexpected wedding in Las Vegas. Along the way—whether on all night drives up the East Coast, shoplifting excursions in the South, book readings on the West Coast, or ill advised grocery runs in Ohio—movies are made with laptop cameras, massive amounts of drugs are ingested, and two young lovers come to learn what it means to share themselves completely. The result is a suspenseful meditation on memory, love, and what it means to be alive, young, and on the fringe in America, or anywhere else for that matter.

By Charles Yu

Charles Yu is the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award for his story collection Third Class Superhero, and was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His work has been published in The New York Times, Playboy, and Slate, among other periodicals. Yu lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Michelle, and their two children.

What does it feel like to be alive? It's an inquiry central to many novels, either explicitly or implicitly, and it has been explored in so many ways, in so many variations and permutations, that it's remarkable when someone finds a new way of asking the question. With Taipei, Tao Lin has managed to do just that. The novel's protagonist, Paul, is a twenty-something writer living in New York City who has at least two extraordinary capabilities: (1) a terrifyingly high tolerance for pharmacological substances, and (2) a prodigious ability to record and recount the moment-to-moment flow of micro-impressions and fleeting sensations of his awareness. While Lin may not be the first writer to combine these two elements in the form of a novel, he is the first one to synthesize them in this particular way, and it is the tension and interaction of these things that make Taipei such a compelling read.

What does it feel like to be alive? Weird. Really weird. That's something very easy to forget - we have an ability to acclimate quickly to our own ambient mental environment. For similar reasons, the fundamental strangeness of being alive is also very hard to articulate. What Tao Lin does is to slow everything down, paying very close attention to everything, registering his findings. The noise and bustle and all-night lights of the big city, first New York City, and then Taipei, the blur of pills and parties and people's faces are presented not as an impressionistic smear, but in careful, deliberate language, prose so precise it cannot be anything but excruciatingly honest. At times, Taipei feels like an experiment, a study on how to use (and abuse) your brain, with Paul communicating in a way that almost feels scientific - he's a scientist studying the strange thing called his self, or an alien who experiences human consciousness as if he were test-driving a brand new technology. It is this detachment which allows Lin to render, in a very pure, very visceral way, what the fringe feels like, a displacement or distance from the center, from your own heart, the psychological impossibility of going to some real or imagined home. Taipei renders all of this with a brute and direct force, and I admit at times that force caused me to flinch. This kind of experience is why I read, though - to be challenged, to be confronted, to experience something completely familiar that has been made entirely new.

"[A] modernist masterpiece. . . . True, his characters are young people living in Brooklyn.  And he writes about the Internet. But we should stop calling Tao Lin the voice of his generation. Taipei, his new novel, has less to do with his generation than with the literary tradition of Knut Hamsun, Ernest Hemingway, and Robert Musil. . . . It’s a new style for Mr. Lin, one that confesses the urgency of his ambition.  If you thought his previous novels were stunts, read this one. . . .It’s not exactly what I expected from Tao Lin’s masterpiece.  Which reminds me why I hadn’t necessarily expected there to be one."--Benjamin Lytal,* The New York Observer 

“Mr. Lin casts a spell in Taipei. . . . [It] is his strongest book. At its best, it has distant echoes of early Hemingway, as filtered through Twitter and Klonopin: it’s terse, neutral, composed of small and often intricate gestures. . . . 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 Mr. Lin’s deftness with what I’ll call emotional close-up work . . . 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 colonizing consciousness. . . . Taipei can be so desultory that you think: this is an approximation of how Lou Reed must have felt during the entirety of 1972. At the same time, it’s possible to imagine Taipei as a future Danny Boyle movie. . . . Mr. Lin’s prose has been compared to that of Bret Easton Ellis’s deadpan early work. . . . But there’s also a hint of Ann Beattie in Mr. Lin, a hint I hope he will be able to cultivate.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“One thing I like about Tao's writing is how beside the point for me 'liking' it feels — it's a frank depiction of the rhythm of a contemporary consciousness or lack of consciousness and so it has a power that bypasses those questions of taste entirely. Like it or not, it has the force of the real.”—Ben Lerner, Author of Leaving the Atocha Station

"Taipei casts a surprisingly introspective eye on the spare, 21st-century landscape Lin has such a knack for depicting. . . . Lin is an existential writer, really, less interested in tracing the contours of his particular social group than in describing the very personal and sometimes unbearable tyranny of one’s own mind—and what it requires (sometimes measured in mg doses) to venture out in search of others. . . . [T]he novel’s climactic scene...by turns terrifying and funny...builds over a few pages to a revelation that, in its sheer unexpected beauty, recalls the powerfully moving ending of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress."--Slate

*"[P]sychologically astute, often beautiful and completely unexpected."—NPR

“[Tao Lin] is a lightning rod for a generation of writers who’ve come of age online.”--NYLON*

"Taipei mashes up the literatures of intoxication (a la Irvine Welsh) and ennui (a la Bret Easton Ellis) to produce a surprisingly clearheaded cautionary tale about a drug-loving young Taiwanese-American art-and-book-world scenester trying to navigate the more consequential realms of family, romance, and adulthood."--ELLE

“With Taipei Tao Lin becomes the most interesting prose stylist of his generation.”—Bret Easton Ellis

"Taipei reveals Lin at his funniest, most incisive best. [...] It’s a book about how to feel and think in a world increasingly designed to numb both faculties [...] his strongest novel yet."—The Globe and Mail
 
"I'm totally taken by it. There's something so unending and relentless about it [...] the style is now so boiled down and austere and yet totally minute. It's tedious yet exhilarating. Such a weird experience reading it."—Kate Zambeno, author of Green Girl
 
"Underneath Tao Lin's sometimes awkward and sometimes hilarious detachment, he offers readers a journey of self-discovery and transformation. Beautiful prose, insightful observations -- highly recommend for anyone interested in what it means to say goodbye to youth."—Matthew Gallaway, author of The Metropolis Case

"Tao Lin [is] an excellent writer of avant-garde fiction. His new novel is his most mature work, and follows a young New York writer to Taipei, where he must reconcile his family’s roots with the haze of MDMA, texts and tweets that he’s been living in. Mr. Lin has refined his deadpan prose style here into an icy, cynical, but ultimately thrilling and unique literary voice."—*New York Observer
“Tao Lin has made a distinctive career out of sticking to his guns, his guns being the ultra-high-res self-consciousness that characterizes our lives but which we routinely ignore in our lives and in our art. In Taipei he is a constant microscope, examining a world of miniature gestures, tiny facial movements, hands in motion, shrugs, nods, twists, ticks, flicks and snaps, a world in which the barrage of information we take in moment by moment is simultaneously cataloged, interpreted, cross-referenced, recorded, and filed. Taipei is a paean to the minutely examined life, where what is examined is every twitch, flinch, jerk, spasm, tremor, and tic, every high-speed half-formed thought, everything that we routinely consider meaningless and inessential. Here all that is turned on its head and becomes central and predominate, fundamental to being. There is no mistaking that we live a new, ultra self-conscious life, skating on the surface of things while overlaying that surface with a facsimile of the "old life" in which traditional values retain their power and majesty. What is fascinating about Tao Lin's fiction is his willingness, nay, insistence, on sticking to the true life of the new century, as raw, flat, fatigued as it may be. In Taipei he follows an utterly modern creature through a semi-robotic life in America and Taiwan, limiting himself and his characters to reasonably accurate renderings of normal responses without the literary humanist overlay, that is to say, a world almost binary and without much in the way of conventional "emotion," the stuff of which storytelling has forever been made. Lin is a 21st century literary adventurer, willing to work with what he actually has rather than a simulacrum of what once was, or might have been. The result is a fascinating book, bone dry, repellant, painful, but relentlessly true to life. Stripped of any version of the pretty Hallmark Card world that occupies so much fiction today, and which seems vulgar and pathetic by comparison, Taipei lays open the present and likely future of ordinary life in a way that few writers would acknowledge, let alone champion. You owe it to yourself to read Taipei, and to contemplate the world it predicts.”—Frederick Barthelme, author of *Waveland

“Taipei is a strange, hypnotic novel—a quarter-life love (and love-lost) story."—Porochista Khakpour, author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects

“For all its straightforwardness, Lin’s previous work—with its flat, Internet-inspired prose issued by small presses—has presented a stumbling stone for readers who fall outside his North Brooklyn contingent, for whom he is the standard bearer. This will change with the breakout Taipei, a novel about disaffection that’s oddly affecting. . . . Everything about Taipei appears to run contrary to the standard idea of what constitutes art. And yet, the documentary precision captures the sleepwalking malaise of Lin’s generation so completely, it’s scary. . . . Yet for all its emotional reality, Taipei is a book without an ounce of self-pity, melodrama, or posturing, making the glacial Lin (Richard Yates) the perfect poster child for a generation facing—and failing to face—maturity.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“The insane level of scrutiny of everyday personal behavior in Taipei feels somewhere between that of Andy Warhol and a young, bored Patrick Bateman. All the strange modernity we’ve come to expect from Tao Lin—alienation, obsession, social confusion, drugs, the internet, sex, food, death—is rendered here with an calm intuition, somehow distant and metaphysical at once, brutally honest and avoidant, touching and monotonic, like getting sewn inside a mask of your own face. And as can also always be expected of the author, it is mesmerizing, sharp, singularly him, a work of vision so relentless it forces most any reader to respond.”—Blake Butler, author of Sky Saw