i expected to like this. running hypothesis: the longer a tao lin text is, the worse it will be. 'love is a thing on sale for more money than there exists' is my favourite thing he's written, and one of my favourite short stories in general. richard yates — a novella — is good in a different way. like something waterlogged — bloated, but still capable of being electric. i saw it in richard yates, but it didn't bother me as acutely; in taipei, lin's pedantic and unaffected style falls completely into navel-gazing territory. as a rule, seemingly, none of his male-insert protagonists are likeable; in taipei, which is 100 per cent about paul, there is no saving grace. i am told that love saves him in the end, but i cannot stand another lifeless description of a klonopin/adderall/psilocybin/whatever-addled day. i can't do it!

i have read many positive reviews of this book on the internet. the praise is largely accurate: tao lin does have a distinctive and original writerly style, and his writing does prod the reader into reacting in some way. however, i disagree with taipei being 'tight' or 'controlled' prose. i found myself skipping over lots and lots while i was reading, lulled into the same kind of boredom that paul seems to chronically suffer from. lin undeniably has a distinctive voice but his 'spareness' is maximalist, in a sense... it is more like a dystopian grocery store full of garishly clean and uninviting nutrient-boxes than a small and well-curated collection of harmonious objects. on a more technical level, there are lots of clunky sentences with extremely displeasing prosody and murky subject-predicate relations. the editing process of this book was supposedly extremely rigorous. i believe it could have been 85 per cent shorter and achieved much more in that space.