The Late Americans
Brandon Taylor
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
The Late Americans
Brandon Taylor
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Taylor’s characters are preoccupied with work, sex, and friendship. History trickles through their lives and conversations, but their minds are elsewhere. This sense of the self as an ahistorical individual might broadly distinguish the American consciousness.
Brandon Taylor’s best book so far. More mature than his Booker-nominated debut, Real Life, more polished than Filthy Animals, his third is a novel about the anxieties and pieties of millennial grad students as they grapple with the art life and, more literally, each other. Taylor asks the big questions.
Bruising, brilliant.
Taylor deftly explores the myth of youth's unbound possibilities as it plays out in the face of constraints of time, space, class and wealth disparities by vividly illustrating the intersecting lives of University of Iowa students pursuing master degrees.
A flow chart would be handy to keep track of all the overlapping relationships, career changes and ethnicities here.
The Late Americans is a smart, sexually-explicit and cynical novel about young people striving or, sometimes 'just' surviving, but don't look for a big take-away about the American Dream in Taylor's deliberately fragmented storyline. His characters are so beyond embracing that age-old American ideal of social mobility..
A novel that is really a linked short story.
The young people of The Late Americans, which is set in and around the University of Iowa, have something spiky and wounded about them.
Full of this enveloping cleverness, a winning combination of caustic observation and pleasurable mischief-making.
While the rotation of narrators and varied specifics of why each relationship in the web is failing may be dizzying at times, it’s ultimately within the mess where Taylor is most successful. If there is a universal truth that Taylor asserts, it’s misunderstanding.
Elegant and restrained.
At first, the story seems like a sendup of campus cancel culture until Seamus meets Bert, a sinister, down-on-his-luck townie.
While the campus novel has a long tradition of airing the foibles of academia, Taylor's critique goes deeper. And darker.
The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels.
The half-dozen or so principal characters in The Late Americans have plenty of overlap – it’s hard to tell them apart without a little mental effort.
There’s more than a whiff in this piss-take of MFA culture of a former creative writing graduate unloading a degree’s worth of beef (you suspect that a small portion of the book’s audience may be reading the workshop scenes very attentively indeed). But the literary send-up is just a springboard for a broader exploration of education, economics and desire.
To read The Late Americans expecting a novel is to wonder, about halfway through, whether its connected stories are headed anywhere collectively. The short answer is, they aren’t. The better approach is to follow the lead of the characters – one of whom, in the final story, surrounded by friends, feels gratitude for the moment they are enjoying and tries not to worry too much about what is next.
Throughout the novel, Taylor explicitly engages with his grand themes of money, power, class, race and consumption (of sex, art, meat).
An insightful and razor-sharp portrait of the interconnected lives of a cohort of writers, dancers, and thinkers living in the contemporary American Midwest.
Lacks a central character; instead, the story flows from one character or pair to the next, leaving the reader to make connections and hold onto each person’s secrets and dreams.
Taylor... [rotates] through a kaleidoscope of characters who may not earn your sympathies but deserve them nonetheless. It’s an artful novel of human hurt, and every character has dignity despite what they may believe about themselves and project onto others..
Taylor...once again demonstrates his aptitude for vernacular. In this novel, he crafts with language related to several disparate fields.
Taylor makes it difficult to care about their under-represented voices because The Late Americans resembles a collection of linked stories, a non-commercial form that diminishes readers’ engagement with necessarily somewhat underdeveloped characters. Every artist faces rejection. Taylor’s publishing strategy seems to be abjection, narrowing his audience, flattening his characters, employing an uncongenial form. And yet here he is a success.
The Late Americans is a prime example of the kind of novel that doesn’t do very novelish things (Sally Rooney writes them too). There is little in the way of plot to hold it together. Instead, the tender, elegant prose combines with sound structural unity to make it work.
Taylor is excellent at scrutinising societal malaise, class and financial inequity and crystallising the toxic relationship between commerce and art. He is adept at illuminating with grace how political the personal actually is, with an unflinching determination to find the truth, however ugly or beautiful.
So much could be a recipe for the worst kind of book, preachy and entirely in thrall to the navel-gazing obsession with racial and sexual identities that blights so many American campuses. Yet Taylor is a more intelligent and ambivalent writer than that would suggest. He holds his characters to a high standard of truthfulness, and his own authorial sympathies turn out to be more evenly divided between the characters than they first seem.
It’s a risky approach to novel writing. But Taylor has a tight grasp on the millennial psyche, the cruel, slippery and tender nature of human interaction, and the fragility of modern existence. It’s with these themes that he ties together seemingly disparate threads.
To read The Late Americans is an intensely intimate experience. It’s not just the sex. (So often in fiction, characters are clumsily harnessed to their bodies; it seems authors would prefer humans were floating vessels of thought and dialogue. Taylor’s late Americans are delightfully burdened by their bodies and desires.) Sex abounds, mostly between men, at times transactional, threatening, make-up, or mundane. Rather, it’s the little cruelties that the characters zip at each other, the fears they can hardly admit to themselves, the palpable loneliness among so many of them.
Taylor writes feelings and physical interactions with a kind of sixth sense, creating scenes readers will visualize with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of sex, power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this..
Complicated and unhappy relationships and sex that seems more like a reflex than a choice are the main motifs throughout much of the novel. Some readers might see the introduction of a new point-of-view character on Page 231 as a fresh start. Other readers might just give up. Lots of characters. Not a lot of depth..
A perceptive chronicle.