While I don‘t like this nearly as much as “Taipei,” it still has a lot to offer. There are many mundane scenes throughout the first three-fourths of the novel, but big payoffs come toward the end—it ties things together and makes me appreciate much of what came before, largely because of Lin‘s mastery of meta elements.
The final section is gorgeous; he‘s writing in a new way that doesn‘t feel like him, which I think was kind of his goal.