'Taipei' Is Lifelike — But That's Not Necessarily A Compliment
For one thing, deadpan realism is a clever shield against criticism: If the novel is bad or boring, well, life is bad and boring. At one point Paul thinks, "I was like a bored robot," which, aside from bouts of excruciating social anxiety and shame, is an apt description of Paul's general mental landscape: He's drug-dulled, antisocial and emotionally barren.
That is not to say that there's nothing lovely in Taipei. Moments of real beauty appear, sudden, stark and unexpected as a skyscraper in the jungle, before the narrative retreats back into drugs and ennui and the bright, blank draw of the Internet, Paul's constant companion.
With a funny and sad description of his shy childhood, Lin perfectly captures Paul's horrified and humiliated sense of his own existence:
When he heard laughter, before he could think or feel anything, his heart would already be beating like he'd sprinted twenty yards. As the beating gradually normalized he'd think of how his heart, unlike him, was safely contained, away from the world, behind bone and inside skin, held by muscles and arteries in its place, carefully off-center, as if to artfully assert itself as source and creator, having grown the chest to hide in and to muffle and absorb — and, later, after innovating the brain and face and limbs, to convert into productive behavior — its uncontrollable, indefensible, unexplainable, embarrassing squeezing of itself.