Brandon Taylor’s ‘The Late Americans’

by Brian Bromberger

Nobel-prize winning poet Louise Gluck is quoted in Brandon Taylor’s latest novel: “What are we without this? Whirling in the dark universe, alone, afraid, unable to influence fate,” setting the bleak tone of this campus novel, more of a linked short story collection that jumps from character to character. Taylor zeroes in on the final year in the interconnected lives of poets, dancers, and other artists – mostly gay men of varying racial and class backgrounds – to form a loose circle of lovers and friends attending university in Iowa City.

Coincidentally, the setting resembles the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa where Taylor got his M.F.A. That experience also provided fodder for his superior brilliant debut, the Booker Prize shortlisted “Real Life,” about the experiences of a gay Black doctoral student in a predominantly white Midwestern Ph.D. program. Another college story, but from a Black vantage perspective usually ignored, it sported an empathic dignity strangely absent from “Late Americans.”

Seamus, the main character (only because he gets two chapters where everyone else has only one), is a white male working-class frustrated poet in a writer’s seminar who voices out loud the pretentiousness of what he’s hearing. He isn’t afraid to give an honest evaluation of his classmates’ work, which he feels is steeped in woke victimhood. He sees their wounds and oppressions as excuses to legitimize substandard output that promulgates an unearned authenticity. He basically hates everyone’s writing. In a later chapter, the class will retaliate by eviscerating Seamus’ excellent poem.

Seamus, asked to leave the class, heads for his job as a hospice kitchen cook. He has a sexual encounter that turns violent with Bert, an older local closeted gay man, whose father is a dying patient there. Bert burns a hole in Seamus’ face with a cigarette. In a later chapter when Seamus is writing his poem, he has sex with Oliver, a fellow seminar student, who confesses he’s doing so because Seamus looked so sad, which enrages him. Seamus can be a self-loathing jerk, but he’s the only character that elicits any sincere rapport with readers.

In the following chapter, we meet a couple Fyodor and Timo, both of whom are mixed-race. Timo, a pianist, comes from a wealthy family.

Fyodor is employed in a meatpacking slaughterhouse as a butcher, which upsets vegetarian Timo who calls it murder, even though he supports the death penalty for mass shooters, a hypocrisy Fyodor denounces. They are an on-andoff-again pair, who separate, then reunite repeatedly.

Then we encounter another unhappy mismatched duo, Black Goran and mixed-race Ivan. They no longer have sex. Ivan formerly attended ballet school, but abandoned that career due to an injury. He’s now pursuing finance so he can make lots of money. Goran, raised by a wealthy adoptive white family, studies music. Ivan sleeps with Noah, a married dancer, “who didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” Noah recommends Ivan do amateur porn for a social media site, which irritates Goran.

There are no happy people in this book.

These intelligent millennial characters debate and argue with each other about race, power, politics, and especially class, trying to ascertain how social forces have shaped their identities, which seem in constant flux. The ones with money feel guilty, as do the poorer Marxist/Socialists trying to survive. There is a nihilist stream underneath all the sturm und drang. Even the act of creativity isn’t a source of salvation, but a soothing balm from torment and past trauma, either revealed or hidden.

The sex, which is bountiful (and well described), seems motivated mostly by boredom or as a wellspring of recreation or temporary succor. The reader might require a flow chart to figure out who’s sleeping with whom.

Ultimately the novel is unsatisfying. The chief flaw, the exception being Seamus, is that all the char- acters seem alike, talking the same way, so it’s easy to get them mixed up or blurred together. For all their intelligence and capabilities, they lack depth and insight about themselves.

This is a novel of despair sans humor, because all the characters seemed steeped in hopelessness and self-loathing. They’re so mean and unforgiving to each other.

Taylor is especially strong in dialogue as well as composing tautly constructed vivid sentences and perceptive razor-sharp snarky observations. “The Late Americans” is a noble beautifully written bravura letdown, but a letdown nonetheless. t

‘The Late Americans: a Novel’ by Brandon Taylor. Riverhead Books, $28. penguinrandomhouse.com brandonlgtaylor.com