Tao Lin, "Taipei" Book Review
Metaphysical Mumblecore
Those of you who have been following me since the beginning will perhaps remember that a long-term fascination of this blog in its early days was the rightward swing of the literary counterculture since roughly 2019 or so. Enamored as I was at that time with typing and Internet taxonomy, I designated this figure the “hipster reactionary” and theorized at frankly unnecessary length what it meant and how it happened. This review of Tao Lin’s Taipei, with its sociological footnotes musing on the relation of alt lit to this reactionary counterculture (which I have amended and expanded slightly for republishing) is probably best read in that light.1 The Regular digest will return on Friday.
I mostly missed Alt Lit in the era when it was first relevant, for a number of reasons. Mostly I think I was too young and too provincial, not really interested in the lives of these twentysomething urban sophisticates with their MFAs and Vicodin addictions, although I don’t think I’d have had much time for it if I’d been properly paying attention: my idea of Great Literature at the time was Dickens and the other Victorians.2 I do remember the proto-#Metoo cascade of sexual assault allegations against the luminaries of the scene that put an end to the whole thing around 2014, so I must have had some knowledge of it back then, but for whatever reason my memory of the personalities, stories and books themselves is a virtual blank.3
But enough of that unpleasantness.4 Alt Lit has been back in a big way these last few years, part of a strange recrudescence of the circa mid-2010s internet (see also: maybe-serious-maybe-joking racism to own-the-SJWs) that’s gradually become dominant on the countercultural right-to-center of our divided society.5 Often when I was reading this and some of the other alt lit I’ve sampled I found myself thinking “this is what our Lasch and Paglia-reading metropolitan betters are angry at the woke libs for taking from them?!??” which is perhaps too dismissive of the writers and their friends and fans, but oh well. I lied about the unpleasantness, just a bit. All of which is to say that I have almost no personal history with this scene, at least none that I remember, and “personal” is really the name of the game here. It’s probably why the whole scene went down in flames like it did: all these guys were their fiction, so when they became perceived as skeevy it tainted the books for people.
Which brings me at last around to Tao Lin, one of the stars of the scene and seemingly in the end its more-or-less undisputed Capital A Artist.6 Prior to the subject of this review, his 2013 novel Taipei Lin had released two vicious little novels of alienation and depression, the absurdist Eeeeee Eee Eeee, the relationship-oriented Richard Yates, and a novella, multiple volumes of poetry, and short story collection which I have not read. The early fiction is… a product of its time and circumstances. I can see the virtues of it, why so many proclaimed Lin an essential new talent and indeed the voice of his generation, but it’s definitely not for me. His prose in those early books has this odd quality of seeming intensely mannered but also somehow flat and bloodless, as if tranquilized. The books are very quirky, ther are talking animals that murder Elijah wood, the characters in Richard Yates are named after child actors from the nineties for some reason, it’s all very twee and very of its moment.
Taipei is something quite different though. Shortly after the book was written (but before it was released) Lin had a mystical experience encountering the work of Terrance McKenna and reinvented himself as a kind of trans-pacific psychedelic searcher, a devotee of mycological mysticism and Neolithic matriarchy, and there is a certain sense of finality to Taipei, a sense of being as David Foster Wallace wrote about one of John Updike’s late works: “certainly the end of something or other.” Which is true, but it also seems to be the beginning of something, of a change in Lin’s writing style away from the clipped mannerism of his early works.
Realizing this was only his concrete history, his public movement through space-time from birth to death, he briefly imagined being able to click on his trajectory to access his private experience, enlarging the dot of a coordinate until it could be explored like a planet.
The Tao Lin of those early fictions wrote short sentences long on alienation, heavy (especially in Eeeeee Eee Eeee) on recurring phrases and choppy diction; in Taipei by contrast they elongate, beginning to display an almost metaphysical elegance only hinted at earlier. The one serious complaint I have about this new style is that it doesn’t quite match the novel’s narrative of drug use, failed romantic relationships and general alienation, although this too may have its place in the evolving design of Lin’s largely autobiographical fiction. There’s an increased attention to the texture of experience, to what it feels like to be drunk enough to not register someone else’s presence but not so much so that you aren’t cognizant of being drunk.
Paul had begun to feel depressed without knowing why—maybe unconsciously intuiting what life would be like in a giant house with a significant other and a routine, how forty or fifty years, like windows on a computer screen, maximized on top of each other, could appear like a single year that would then need to be lived repeatedly, so that one felt both nearer and withheld from death—and within a few minutes was silent and visibly troubled, staring down at his salad.
That said it’s still pretty much all alienation and drug use. I’ve never really been one for psychedelics or pills-alcohol and caffeine have always been my drugs of choice, with tobacco and cannabis as a social thing-but Lin makes them seem the least appealing things imaginable here. Much of the second half of the book is dedicated to the Lin-surrogate Paul’s developing relationship and eventually disastrous marriage to a woman named Erin, and a trip they take together to visit his parents in Taipei, but there’s not much of a plot here-mostly a bunch of drugged up antics, dialogues, and assorted things happening. It feels very much like an indie comedy of the era it was written and set in, some forgotten mumblecore picture released to moderate acclaim and swiftly forgotten by most people. I wasn’t terribly surprised to discover that a film adaptation of this was apparently made in 2018, although I opted not to see it.
Sometimes it was less of a feeling than a realization that maybe after you died, in the absence of time, without a mechanism for tolerance, or means of communication, you could privately experience a nightmare state for an eternity.
Much of the Taiwan segment of the book drops in and out of a metafictional gimmick about Paul and Erin filming a documentary on their macbooks. It’s a strange device that made me realize that part of the uncanniness of the book is that Paul/Lin seems able to process himself only as a character in his own fiction-and not a terribly interesting or likable character at that. As the relationship deteriorates across the last 40 pages of the book he comes across as neurotic and controlling, but at times a man on the verge of a conversion, increasingly disenchanted with the world he’s surrounded himself with, and the novel ends on a suitably peculiar note with a hallucinogenic experience of Paul becoming convinced he’s died of a heroin overdose but finding himself
surprised when he heard himself, looking at his feet stepping into black sandals, say that he felt “grateful to be alive.”
The result of Lin’s labors is a better book than any of its predecessors, but I’d still say it wasn’t really for me-I’d encourage a new reader to head toward Leave Society first and then return to this one. To get the full effect of this kind of druggy scene tragicomedy one has either to have actually lived that life or wanted to, and I’ve done neither. There’s a lot to praise in terms of form here: as noted, the structure and diction of the book is a major step up from his earlier works, and I especially enjoyed the periodic metaphysical digressions, but the subject they serve doesn’t suit them at all. I was impressed by Taipei, but I would be lying if I said that I particularly liked it.
I promise there are no more of waiting these in the wings, any reviews moving forward will be new.
Given this, it’s perhaps not at all a coincidence then that I still very definitely prefer (one of) the preceding era(s), the “hysterical realism” of the end of the 20th century and the turn of the millennium to alt lit, considering that the critic James Wood in coining the term opined memorably that “Familial resemblances are asserting themselves, and a parent can be named: he is Dickens.” Not all of that material was unjustly dismissed-we probably only need one or two Pynchonian or DeLillian figures at any given time, and I’m not always convinced the younger practitioners of that style always understood what their predecessors were trying to achieve-but I’ll take a big, baggy novel of cracked perspectives trying to embrace the whole of society over these microdoses of alienated consciousness any day.
Curiously I do remember reading the 2014 essay defending said luminaries that got Hobart’s Elizabeth Ellen cancelled (I think before people had even started calling it that) the first time. Why the hell did I read that essay when I barely knew who Tao Lin was at the time? It’s genuinely baffling to me in hindsight. I must have had some idea of who these people were, but between 2014 and the conflagration surrounding Ellen’s 2022 Alex Perez interview I managed to (barring Lin) nearly completely forget all these people.
I bring all this up not out of a desire to perpetuate the decade-old cancellations of any of these figures: whatever I might think, the culture at large has mostly seen fit to let people like Lin and Ellen back in. I do find the alleged behavior unseemly and that Ellen essay seems… naïve about exactly how inflammatory what she’s saying is (at least the first part, where she sounds like a baby boomer mother-I think she could probably have gotten away with the rest of the essay if the opening was less.. that) I just think that it’s all a part of the story, and thus worth bringing up even if I'm actually not that interested in engaging with it.
It’s interesting to note how the Ellen essay I mentioned in footnote 3-widely attacked by right thinking people at the time of initial publication as rape apologia-makes a case along fairly liberal lines for innocence until proven guilty and similarly egalitarian traditional values of our democratic republic. This contrasts quite notably with where the energy of that part of the scene has gone in the last decade or so in response to the drift of the overall culture. One imagines that a similar sensibility today would monotone something like “rape is sexxxyyyyy” on a podcast in lieu of writing an essay.
If there’s anyone else I should be running after to mop up at this point do let me know will you?