Taipei by Tao Lin, review Taipei traces similar territory to these previous novels, but it does so with a new assurance and a wider scope. It tells the story of Paul who, like Lin, is a young writer who has had some success. Paul gives readings at universities and bookshops, goes to bars and attends literary parties, fuelled by a variety of prescription drugs. Midway through the novel he meets a woman named Erin on a book tour. They get together and spend their days taking drugs, discussing how they feel about each other and making lo-fi films on their MacBooks, before getting married in Las Vegas on a whim. Afterwards they visit Paul's parents in Taiwan for a disastrous honeymoon. He's not much interested in charting the interior lives of his characters either. Everything is described in terms of what one character calls "Robot-like extroversion." Characters don't think but rather narrate themselves, as though they were the protagonists of their own novels. Actions are atomised: people don't "sit up" they "move into a sitting position"; characters never look happy, sad or indifferent, but have "neutral," "mask-like" or "fish-like" expressions. Bodies are detached from the minds that inhabit them and the gestures they perform. "He suppressed a grin," a typical description goes, "then channelled the impulse into the formation of what he thought of as a nervous smile." Lin is fond of "seemed," used to draw attention to the fact that no one in this novel is omniscient or sure of themselves, least of all the narrator. Numbers are often left determinately indeterminate: "four to six" people leave one party, "eight to 12 people" are waiting at another. Time passes in "vague amounts." The imprecision of metaphor, its fundamental fraudulence, is suggested by the equivocal "language-y noises" and "soil-y areas" which are about as figurative as Lin gets. People have heard everyone from Hemingway to Evelyn Waugh to Beckett in Lin's sentences (I'd add Wyndham Lewis to the list), but really they're his own. They testify to the inadequacy of language, and to the fact that realist fiction's usual tricks and gimmicks - the whole shoddy mimetic project - seem increasingly insufficient or irrelevant. It's a product of the disembodiedness of the internet, this prose, in which a laugh isn't a laugh but a "lol"; in which characters must constantly reassure each other (and us) that they're not being sarcastic, or that they're not angry (even when they are). Our internet selves inhabit a curiously inarticulate space: able to communicate as never before, we are also able to misunderstand as never before. The effects Lin creates are alienating and frustrating, but like all true styles this is infectious stuff, permeating not only writing, but thought itself. Taipei by Tao Lin 256pp, Canongate, £9.99 (PLUS £1.35 p&p) 0844 871 1515 RRP £9.99, ebook £5.15