Brandon Taylor’s absorbing debut, Real Life, shortlisted for the Booker in 2020, followed a gay black biochemistry postgrad who finds his path absurdly trip-wired by the assumptions of white colleagues. As satire, it was phenomenally effective, with the choicest skewering saved for those who see the main character primarily as a means to trumpet their own empathy. Crucially, the book never made a saint of its protagonist, who, more than ready to feel the weight of the world on his shoulders, has one or two blind spots of his own.
Taylor’s next book, Filthy Animals, was a series of linked short stories
again exploring class, sex and race in a campus setting but this time
inhabiting three characters rather than one. His new book, dubbed “a
symphony of a novel” (blurb-speak for “barely disguised story collection”), sticks with higher-ed sexual entanglements in the American midwest but further stretches his canvas to more than double the number of characters, with uncertain results.
It opens in a poetry workshop as seen through the eyes of one of its students, Seamus, whose peers are, he thinks, merely “tethering their bad ideas to recognised names and hoping someone would call them smart, call them sharp, call them radical and right, call them a poet and a thinker and a mind, even if they were just children”. He can’t hide his disparagement, not least of someone “whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon”. His sceptical comments rile female classmates who are quick to accuse him of “violence”.
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. When class is brought prematurely to an end and Seamus picks up an extra shift at the hospice kitchen where he funds his study, Taylor introduces the book’s central tension, between students who have money and those who don’t, as micro-dramas continually break out among its highly strung cast over, say, the morality of selling sex clips online or working in an abattoir as they pursue ambitions in music, dance and writing.
Real Life drew power from putting us in the headspace of a single character at odds with his milieu. Nothing in The Late Americans matches the dramatic interest of that book; the basic but unignorable problem is that the characters are simply too inert. Dialogue boils down to passive-aggressive squabbles that circle unvoiced emotion, a tension-generating strategy dulled through overuse. It hardly helps that the novel itself keeps insisting how irrelevant everything is. What starts as the despondency of particular characters (“He mattered so little”; “They were all inconsequential”) spirals into a kind of blanket auto-cancellation: “the whole world, the whole procession of its events marched on without a single notice or care that there in their tiny, obscure particle of the galaxy, two people’s hearts were breaking over and over again”.
That worn-down register is really a literary humblebrag, asserting modesty while ludicrously laying claim to a cosmic vantage point. Throughout, Taylor’s cadences lunge for high-literary heft: I gave up counting how often he deployed formulations such as “the oily salt of it” (when someone is thinking about the sauce on their penne) or “the warm animal of himself” (when someone is thinking about, well, not penne). The tone is exhausting. Witness this chapter opening:
“Ivan and Goran did not talk about how long it had been since they had
fucked. They did not talk about how long it had been since they had held
each other and fallen asleep. They slept together, woke together, ate
together, and otherwise went about their lives as though nothing at all
changed, though of course everything had.
It was not denial. It was something else – fear, perhaps, or a lack of
caring.”
The passage, first brusque, then tender, gives way to characteristically fussy self-correction that sounds solemn but ultimately feels like padding. There’s no sign of the sense of humour that Real Life had in abundance. Why? Taylor is too smart not to know what he’s doing – his critical essays on Substack are an education for anyone interested in reading or writing – yet the overall effect resembles nothing so much as a dare to create character-driven fiction from austerely deprived means, as if draining the dregs of his theme before lighting out for new turf.
• The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
