Tao Lin's eighth book, Trip, is his best yet, and it’s all thanks to drugs ... Lin...has never been more creative, precise, or inspired than when he details psychedelics-begotten behavior and theories. The behavior is mostly his own, while the theories are often borrowed from Terence McKenna, the late psilocybin advocate whose YouTube videos started Lin down the path to revitalization ... When Trip sloughs off the weight of McKenna’s influence, it becomes a joy to read. Lin is a meticulous cataloguer ... By recounting his drug experimentation, he’s found the perfect outlet for his obsessive MO. His hypersensitivity to the granularity of lived experience becomes a boon ... His rendering of tripping is perfect—better even, for me, than Aldous Huxley’s elegant and evocative passages in The Doors of Perception, because Lin’s account conveys reverence and immersion without grandiosity. And that allows humor to leak through ... It was not out of callousness that I wrote 'lol, yes' in the margins. It was out of recognition.
Trip, Lin’s first properly nonfiction book, probably isn’t going to convert any haters—it’s still full of angular idiomatic ticks (his trademark stiff tone and mania for quantifying things in numbers, to name a few). And there’s that awkward self-consciousness that sometimes makes you feel a little embarrassed, like you’re reading an undergraduate term paper. But for those predisposed to Lin’s peculiar voice, it’s also probably the most personal, engaging, and sophisticated thing he’s written so far. To be clear, I’m squarely in the latter camp ... a key to what the book is about, beyond the quiet despair of ordinary life and drugs’ power to cure it: it’s about a young writer on a quest to understand his obsession with translating experience into language, and trying to find the best way to do so ... In his efforts to record those experiences, Lin eschews the rigorous refusal of adjectives and figurative language that defined his earlier novels, trying here to create a much richer textual world ... Trip is thus a document of an evolving process ... It is also calmly beautiful—fracturing loneliness and humming with hope.
Lin avoids writing in figurative language, and there is little hyperbole in these reports, nor references to nineteen-sixties-era acid metaphysics. Trip is, if not a guide to self-help, a book about a person trying to be happier, in part by changing the kinds of drugs he uses ... another theory of psychedelics emerges, which suggests that the most mystical revelations concern earthly themes: birth, death, and the body; family, friends, and love.
The journalistic memoir documents Lin’s radical lifestyle change following the depression and pharmaceutical drug addiction fictionalized in his previous novel, Taipei ... As evidenced in all of his books, Lin is skilled at documenting the unique discomforts of social interaction ... Lin weaves the history of psychedelics and their criminality with his own personal experience serving on a federal grand jury. Here, Lin matter-of-factly pinpoints, without sensationalizing, the criminal justice system’s problematic underpinnings ... For 189 pages, Lin has painstakingly measured everything from historical eras to his drug intake to his exercise routine ... Lin is nothing if not meticulous, but that’s not to say this book is devoid of feeling. Fellow author and Lin’s friend Sam Pink wrote in his Goodreads review that he believes Trip 'will help shift our gloomy tides,' and I hope he’s right.
Begin adjusting all your pettily benumbed alt dork lit pride, or hatreds thereupon, because Trip is his masterpiece ... An alien robot might be the best crash test dummy to funnel a bunch of drugs and spit out a conclusion for the less intrepid partier. It is beautiful to see a superior being eat its own programming with chemical assistance ... the book is a fun, funny, and informative read (the appendix is a scholarly poem of biology, nutrition, and history) aimed toward a better world ... His fragmental notation suicides into an overarching lucidity, a polyrhythmic Chopin fractal transcending the buzz ... Tao Lin is an efficacious symbiont providing maximum extrinsic purpose, dispatching units to the gestalt that, by dotage of his grueling fiats, has thrived into some kind of witenagemot across the age.
He is vulnerable and struggling to find meaning in his life. His dependence on the Internet and on his cell phone compounds his confusion and malaise. He hopes that naturally occurring psychedelics will have a healing force, help him understand his own mortality, and show him why he is driven to make art ... With a mix of bravado and courage Lin then smokes the leaf of Salvia divinorum ... Lin’s account sometimes enters the third person ... the human desire to alter consciousness and enrich self-awareness shows no sign of receding, and someone must always go first. As long as care and diligence accompany the sort of personal research conducted by...Tao Lin, it has the potential to be as revealing and informative as any work on psychedelic drugs conducted within the rigid confines of universities.
... a charming and idiosyncratic example of 'psychedelic boosterism' ... Despite showcasing an impressive research bibliography, Trip is ultimately a highly personal series of detailed 'trip reports.' It often feels more descriptive than analytical, driven by a compulsion to catalog and count ... Despite its sometimes evangelical tone, the reader finishes this research study-cum-memoir convinced that ingesting psychedelic chemicals does not by itself lead the user to new cosmological perspectives ... Fittingly, Lin does not cling to the specific ideas [Terrance] McKenna put forth but instead embraces his guru’s larger cosmic skepticism. This epistemological and ontological questioning is the book’s most refreshing aspect.
In this peculiar yet addictive patchwork of memoir, biography, and meditative self-analysis,the author ... briskly escorts readers through McKenna’s nomadic life as a self-proclaimed 'hardheaded rationalist,' and he explores his visions, public talks, and imaginative interpretations with encyclopedic thoroughness ... buzzed, foggy, meandering, and eccentric ... A kaleidoscopic fever dream of ideas, idolatry, and lots of drugs: uniquely produced and curiously intoxicating.
The psychedelics Lin zeroes in on are all naturally occurring, and he is best at examining and questioning the illegality and societal suppression of substances that he contends allow him to safely explore topics like time and consciousness. A lengthy epilogue, in which he switches to a third-person narrative, follows Lin to San Francisco on a visit with Kathleen Harrison, McKenna’s ex-wife and a strong proponent of psychedelics herself. It’s here that Lin’s tendency to rattle off precise measurements and scientific terms in quick succession starts to feel a bit long-winded. He eventually steers the epilogue toward a level of personal clarity that perfectly punctuates an introspective work of this depth and caliber.
