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”.
