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A review by jesshindes
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor
emotional
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
4.0
First book of the year is Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans. I enjoy following Taylor on Twitter, where he has lots of opinions about the kinds of classic authors that I enjoy (for example: he loathed the Netflix Persuasion adaptation), but I hadn't read his fiction until now. This felt very much like a novel in the tradition of the 19th century novel (I kept thinking of Henry James, but I don't know if that's just because of his title). I liked it. I'm going to write more about this book for the blog I'm starting - I'm planning to sit it against Howards End, so we'll see how that goes - but I wanted to get my first thoughts down here, too.
The book is set in Iowa City, where Taylor was a grad student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (the longest-established and most prestigious creative writing programme in the USA) and where his characters are also mostly graduate students at the university, mostly in the arts, mostly coming to the ends of their study, mostly trying to figure out their place in the world as they emerge from that slightly suspended, in-between state of being a student (and especially being a student of something like poetry or dance). A lot of the book is very reflective as all of these smart artistic people try to understand what they want out of life and how they relate to other people within it, which is probably part of what gave it this Great Novel kind of vibe to me.
The chapters have different central characters (some recur, some don't); lots of the characters know each other. They all for some reason had really specific names, which is fine but which somehow confused me in my mind so it took me a while to remember who was Goran and who was Ivan and who was Fyodor (and writing this I wonder if half of these are like, references to specific writers that I should be thinking of, but probably not). Of course you end up comparing the characters when you encounter them this way and in reviews I saw that most people preferred Seamus, who is a poet and is caught in this very antagonistic relationship to most of the rest of his class (and honestly this book did not make me want to do the IWW, it is not a super appealing portrait of how the workshops go). I actually liked Fatima best who is one of only two female POV characters within the novel and who is in dance class but is looked down on by lots of her classmates because she has to work in a coffee shop to support herself. There's a scene where a classmate sexually assaults her and she goes to complain to the teacher about it and gets completely shut down which made me very! angry but which felt very accurately observed.
This question of artistic work versus work for money runs through the whole book and felt like a central part of what Taylor was exploring in it; tied up with that is a question about authenticity, and the idea that for a lot of people these ideas can be theoretical and ideological but that even to be able to debate these things (if you work for money alongside your art, are you a truly committed artist?) you have to be coming from an extremely privileged position, that there's a hypocrisy or inauthenticity built into that. Taylor is interested in how we perform for other people's judgement (very true when you're a student/when you're young but of course true for a lot longer than that) and his characters consciously grapple with this issue. That's a lot of what I mean when I say they're trying to figure out how and what they want to be. The book ends in what feels like quite a warm and generous place but of course it's not possible to boil all of these complex things down to one answer or one point of view, which is fine I think. I did feel satisfied by the end, and I'd read more Taylor. Like I said at the start, I feel like lots of the people I read are trying to push and do new weird idiosyncratic things but he's more interested in speaking back to a tradition, which I find an interesting and worthwhile thing to do (if you can pull it off!).
The book is set in Iowa City, where Taylor was a grad student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (the longest-established and most prestigious creative writing programme in the USA) and where his characters are also mostly graduate students at the university, mostly in the arts, mostly coming to the ends of their study, mostly trying to figure out their place in the world as they emerge from that slightly suspended, in-between state of being a student (and especially being a student of something like poetry or dance). A lot of the book is very reflective as all of these smart artistic people try to understand what they want out of life and how they relate to other people within it, which is probably part of what gave it this Great Novel kind of vibe to me.
The chapters have different central characters (some recur, some don't); lots of the characters know each other. They all for some reason had really specific names, which is fine but which somehow confused me in my mind so it took me a while to remember who was Goran and who was Ivan and who was Fyodor (and writing this I wonder if half of these are like, references to specific writers that I should be thinking of, but probably not). Of course you end up comparing the characters when you encounter them this way and in reviews I saw that most people preferred Seamus, who is a poet and is caught in this very antagonistic relationship to most of the rest of his class (and honestly this book did not make me want to do the IWW, it is not a super appealing portrait of how the workshops go). I actually liked Fatima best who is one of only two female POV characters within the novel and who is in dance class but is looked down on by lots of her classmates because she has to work in a coffee shop to support herself. There's a scene where a classmate sexually assaults her and she goes to complain to the teacher about it and gets completely shut down which made me very! angry but which felt very accurately observed.
This question of artistic work versus work for money runs through the whole book and felt like a central part of what Taylor was exploring in it; tied up with that is a question about authenticity, and the idea that for a lot of people these ideas can be theoretical and ideological but that even to be able to debate these things (if you work for money alongside your art, are you a truly committed artist?) you have to be coming from an extremely privileged position, that there's a hypocrisy or inauthenticity built into that. Taylor is interested in how we perform for other people's judgement (very true when you're a student/when you're young but of course true for a lot longer than that) and his characters consciously grapple with this issue. That's a lot of what I mean when I say they're trying to figure out how and what they want to be. The book ends in what feels like quite a warm and generous place but of course it's not possible to boil all of these complex things down to one answer or one point of view, which is fine I think. I did feel satisfied by the end, and I'd read more Taylor. Like I said at the start, I feel like lots of the people I read are trying to push and do new weird idiosyncratic things but he's more interested in speaking back to a tradition, which I find an interesting and worthwhile thing to do (if you can pull it off!).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual assault
Minor: Abortion