Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (book) - Critical Response

Critical Response

Lin's writing has attracted both negative and positive attention from various publications. Gawker once referred to him as "maybe perhaps the single most irritating person we've ever had to deal with", though he was later "pardoned". After the "pardon", Gawker published a piece Lin had written.

L Magazine said, "We've long been deeply irked by Lin's vacuous posturing and 'I know you are but what am I' dorm-room philosophizing..." Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, wrote, "Dismissing Lin, however, ignores the fact that he is deeply smart, funny, and head-over-heels dedicated in exactly the way we like our young artists to be." Miranda July has praised his work as "moving and necessary."

An article in The Atlantic described Lin as having a "fairly staggering" knack for self-promotion. The same article said "there's something unusual about a writer being so transparent, so ready to tell you every insignificant detail of a seemingly eventful day, so aware of his next novel's word count, yet also remaining so opaque, mysterious..."

Lin's work has increasingly been praised in the UK, including positive reviews from The Guardian and a career overview from London Review of Books.

An article in AALR in 2012, reviewing Lin's prose books, stated:

David Foster Wallace concluded “E Unabus Pluram” with the hope that one day, a writer, bilingual in both irony and sincerity, would be able to engage a post-ironic audience without need of the essentially terminal narrative armaments his postmodern forefathers bequeathed her (or him). And if Tao Lin has one gift, it is a biplanar ability to convince a generation of sincerity-starved young men and women to embrace his realist, single-entendre fiction while convincingly presenting himself as the inveterately hip jester of the online-spawned lit scene. Replete with single quotes, unblinking unseriousness, the word ‘bro,’ and punk-y shots at the corporate literary edifice, Lin’s very funny, very “self-aware” Internet presence is a signal to MacBook owners the world over that he is, most importantly, one of them. Lin’s fiction and poetry, replete with a baseline sadness, blips of absurdity, and a monastic commitment to personal truth, has the freshly coined and postmodernity-prescribed ability to seize the techno-catatonic comment-section dwellers who were repulsed or charmed enough by online Lin to face a set of his sentences and make abundantly clear that, yes, he does know what it’s like to exist online yet have to honestly live offline.