"""[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."--Dwig
