A 10-Quote Argument for Reading Tao Lin’s Tai Pei

Sometimes the most important literature out there is the kind that’s so depressingly relatable, you can’t help but fall into a spiral of melancholy recognition by the third chapter. Tao Lin’s Taipei, for all the flack it’s received, is both a necessary and painful contribution to the millennial literary canon. It describes the numbness of a digital, drugged world, where people bounce between online and real-life encounters like ping-pong balls. The story is based on Paul, a drug-reliant writer in New York who believes that everyone is a slave to some kind of instant gratification. As he navigates the literary and social spheres that he’s neither part of nor divorced from, he chronicles with utter detachment the nomadic search for meaning among his peers—or something.
By picking apart a novel’s worth of noncommittal prose and reducing it to a blog post, I’m further perpetuating the culture that this book critiques—but I’m doing it in the hopes that you’ll decide to read the whole thing. Just a taste of Lin’s prose is enough to tell you if his writing is for you. With that in mind, here are the ten most depressing (and characteristic) lines from Taipei:
1. “Then he was sitting on a mattress in a space-module like bedroom, in which six to ten people, smoking marijuana, watched a video off a MacBook of obese people screaming in pain earnestly while exercising and being screamed at motivationally, in what seemed to be a grotesque parody, or something, of something.”
2. He reached outside his blanket and pulled his MacBook, “darkly,” he felt, toward himself like an octopus might.
3. On the fourth-story roof Paul said he wanted to run “really fast in a circle,” vaguely aware and mostly unconcerned, though he knew he didn’t want to die—less because he had an urge to live than because dying, like knitting or backgammon, seemed irrelevant to his life—that due to alcohol and Klonopin, in a moment of inattention, he could easily walk off the building.
4. Except for a broom and what Daniel confirmed—grimly, Paul felt—was a giant plastic eggplant of unknown origin, there was nothing else in the common room.
5. Around twenty-five people were dancing to loud music with faces that seemed expressive in an emotionless, hidden, bone-ward manner—the faces of people with the ability to stop clutching the objects of themselves and allow their brains, like independent universes with unique and inconstant natural laws, to react, like trees to wind, with their bodies to music.
6. Then they discussed what to do now, for an activity, but couldn’t decide—each person seemed committed to not deciding—and became locked into what felt like a three-way staring contest, which they mutely sustained, each person alternating between the other two, for thirty to forty seconds, until Paul bluntly said he wanted to “go for a walk with only Erin, outside,” and after mumbling something incoherent about mushrooms—vaguely wanting to convey it was uncomfortable while on mushrooms to be around people not on mushrooms—quickly gained Erin’s assent and repeatedly positioned himself to displace, or push, her toward where he was going, until both were outside the room, in a dark hallway, where they huddled together and maneuvered grinning to winding stairs, which they descended holding hands, toward the front door.
7. Then she texted less, and with less attention, and one night didn’t respond to a photo Paul sent from a café in Chicago, where he was staying for four days, of a Back to the Future poster—
He was never in time
for his classes . . .
He wasn’t in time
for this dinner . . .
Then one day . . .
he wasn’t in his
time at all.
—until morning, when she texted “lol” and that she’d been asleep, but she didn’t reciprocate a photo, or ask a question, so they stopped texting.
8. The next four hours they had sex (and showered) three times, shared 50-oz kale-celery-apple-lemon juice and 30mg Adderall, typed accounts of a cold and sunny afternoon one week ago when they walked around SoHo on MDMA shouting and screaming iterations of Charles’ name (initials, first, first and last, full) at each other while holding hands.
9. Erin said she felt better than when she’d been paranoid, but seemed reluctant to reciprocate Paul’s enthusiasm when, with a child-like sensation of wanting to be encouraged to believe a fantasy, or that an aberration was the norm, he said, for the third time since getting on the plan, as if stressing the unexpected discovery of something worth living for, in an existence in which most things were endured, not enjoyed, that it seemed good they used “all those drugs and energy drinks” and hadn’t slept and still felt “okay.”
10. “We’re all just going to keep forgetting it,” said Paul “pessimistically,” he thought, and when he exited the taxi he walked into, instead of onto, the sidewalk and fell stumbling ahead in an uninhibited, loosely controlled, briefly controlled manner reminiscent of childhood, when this partial to complete abandonment of body and/or limb (of rolling like a log on carpet, falling face-first onto beds, being dragged by an arm or both legs through houses or side yard, floating in swimming pools, lying upside down in headstands on sofas) was normal, allowing his unexpected momentum to naturally expend, falling horizontally for an amusingly far length.
Are you planning to read Taipei?