Scan barcode
A review by jdscott50
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Award-winning author Brandon Taylor returns with a new novel. Fresh off the success of Real Life and Filthy Animals, Taylor's book, The Late Americans, details the lives of students and residents of a small Iowa college town. Each struggling for their identity and future, they confront the illusions that make up their life to create solid ground.
They are poets, dancers, and townies, all struggling into the next phase of their lives. It is a novel, but broken up like short stories, we follow those characters through their relationships and what happens next.
I like this book focuses on the great uncertainties of life. College can be a dreamland with endless possibilities. As that dream comes to an end, panic sets in. A cold shower to awaken the senses of the dangers of life. Can I make a career out of this? Pursuit of passion, but will that lead to survival? Take the safe route, but is that a life of fulfillment? The landscape of Iowa can come off as Hellish as if they are all in limbo. Who will escape? Who will meet their fate?
I enjoyed the classic literary undertones of Taylor's work. Even the turn to Fatima at the end, like he's approaching his fate. It's another magnificent tale from a modern master.
Favorite Passages:
“It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized 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.”
Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.
Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But soon that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died.
Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little.
They are poets, dancers, and townies, all struggling into the next phase of their lives. It is a novel, but broken up like short stories, we follow those characters through their relationships and what happens next.
I like this book focuses on the great uncertainties of life. College can be a dreamland with endless possibilities. As that dream comes to an end, panic sets in. A cold shower to awaken the senses of the dangers of life. Can I make a career out of this? Pursuit of passion, but will that lead to survival? Take the safe route, but is that a life of fulfillment? The landscape of Iowa can come off as Hellish as if they are all in limbo. Who will escape? Who will meet their fate?
I enjoyed the classic literary undertones of Taylor's work. Even the turn to Fatima at the end, like he's approaching his fate. It's another magnificent tale from a modern master.
Favorite Passages:
“It would have been easier for these poets to say that sometimes you lied and sometimes you were mistaken and sometimes the truth changed on you in the course of telling. That sometimes trauma reconfigured your relationship both to the truth and to the very apparatus of telling. But no, they went on signifying. Tethering their bad ideas to recognized 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.”
Witness and legacy of violence and valid: such terms made poetry seminar feel less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.
Everyone was always so optimistic at first, when they arrived at the hospice. See, look at how beautiful it is. See, you will have a view of these trees. It’s hardly even like being on the East Side. Oh, look, there are ducks in the pond. There is a knitting circle every day. Once a month, a group of young children comes to read and do crafts. The busy politeness you offered the god of dying in order to pretend for a little while that you were simply on a brief respite from your life, that before long you would get to return. But soon that wore off. Some came out of it, joined the ongoing projects of hospice life: the garden, the compost, the deer, the bird-watching, the knitting, the crafts. And some did not. They sat by their windows and waited. And then they died.
Taking his bike across the bridge. The wind was stronger then, slicing up his face. He looked up. The stars, he thought, had been watching him his whole life. They’d seen the whole thing go on and on. Him and the rest of all the people who had ever lived and ever would.
It was like living in a museum exhibit or a dollhouse. It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives on their circuits like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans. A God with a Gorgon’s head peering down in judgment.
What were you supposed to do in the face of that? Turn to stone? Fuck.
He mattered so little.
He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.
Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance.
Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart.
How to make his own feelings understood? How to say, I see you, I love you, I’m sorry? But sorry was just a cheap, dirty little word. It presupposed an orderly world. It presupposed that it was ever possible to make up for what had come before.
Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.
He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.
“Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.”
Perhaps that is what you call it when you appeal to the world about something that has happened to you and the world answers back that it’s fine if you leave, as though you were nothing but an irritating child being sent on your way.
Fyodor still thought sometimes about the shooting in Alabama. There had been four other shootings across the South in the last month or so, each rising for a brief instant above the noise and clamor of the news, the whole country looking in one direction at one thing, burning a hole in the fabric of the culture. But then, the next day or the next, their thoughts turned back to the common demands of daily life. Everyone went back into the anonymous whir of things, safe inside their irrelevance.
Climbing the stairs at Noah’s party, his hand at Goran’s back, Ivan could see in the eyes of these young people, too, how desperately they wanted to be—and how desperately this hinged on being seen. That if no one witnessed you in the state of freedom, then you were not free. This seemed, to Ivan, really sad. He wanted to grip their shoulders and tell them to leave and to go and just be, just get the fuck out and do something with themselves. They still had time, they were so young. But what right did he have? He was not older than them. Not old enough to justify giving them orphic warnings from the shores of his second life. But he did know something about wanting to be finished with a part of your life before you were really ready, how you could trick yourself into thinking you knew so much when in fact you knew nothing at all. These dancers. High, glossed out of their minds, riding a wave of pleasure. They were so fucking alive. And they were dead already. And it broke his heart.
How to make his own feelings understood? How to say, I see you, I love you, I’m sorry? But sorry was just a cheap, dirty little word. It presupposed an orderly world. It presupposed that it was ever possible to make up for what had come before.
Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.
He thought he could understand Bert a little now, seeing the fields and how close the sky stooped in the distance. He understood the peculiar loneliness of such a place, the way that loneliness held fast to you, no matter how far away you ran. You grow up in a place like this, Noah thought, and it haunts your dreams until you die.
“Money is like an animal, changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it.”
Perhaps that is what you call it when you appeal to the world about something that has happened to you and the world answers back that it’s fine if you leave, as though you were nothing but an irritating child being sent on your way.