Taipei by Tao Lin

TaiPei is an unflinching and hate-filled account of a group of people with a commitment to nothing greater than themselves, written in a purposefully mundane style. It would be wrong to call it a parody of the second-rate hipsters Tao Lin documents, as there is no exaggerated lampooning here. Instead, Lin methodically mirrors the completely inconsequential focus of their lives, appropriating an insular, technology-laden lexicon that is an ideal fit for the scorn he pours on these characters, over and over again.

Our protagonist Paul, like many of the people he surrounds himself with (true fraternity is denied), is a clearly intelligent, yet endlessly juvenile creation, trapped in a gyre of adolescence. Although a successful writer to a small, but dedicated following of equally banal, ennui-ridden fans, he spends the majority of the novel drifting between a series of uninteresting encounters, ingesting superhuman amounts of drugs, losing himself to introspection.

This is all done very very well. So well, you may find yourself believing at times that Lin is actually sincere and that we should be interested in these people's lives, that they ever present themselves as containing a modicum of worth. But then, he will throw in a line like, "He minimized Safari and saw his face, which seemed bored and depressed, his default expression." and you are reassured, knowing Lin is offering a sly wink, sharing with you a despair and hopelessness over this particular slice of North American self-indulgence.

Yet, this is part of the reason the novel is also largely a failure. The subculture of exaggeratedly disaffected youth Lin lambastes are really not worth anyone's time or interest. It is hard to imagine why a writer so clearly talented would choose to focus on the minutiae of the least appealing aspects of a character like Paul, when he is clearly capable of engaging far larger targets, or even offering something genuine on a relevant subculture of people, who have moved beyond the teenage constraints of Taipei. In the end then, the novel feels like an extended exercise; a writer flexing his constraint and exactitude over a subject well below him, and this is what disappoints most.