The stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in 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 … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when pain is both ubiquitous and mundane? The answer comes in bodily connection, but physical encounters may result merely in the transfer of pain.
Taylor emerged aged 30 with his Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut Real Life. This was a painful, often funny, always dazzling autobiographical novel, with the narrator closely inside the head and body of its lonely Black, gay graduate student protagonist. Taylor revealed himself as brilliant at intense, awkward social comedy, and revelatory, unerotic sex scenes. The skill was in the delineation of moment-by-moment bodily life, charting tiny shifts between tenderness and violence and the hourly exhaustion of being in a disordered body. Unusually, Taylor was prepared to tell as well as to show, using his characters to think hard about his world.
These were the strengths and preoccupations, too, of his 2021 short story collection, Filthy Animals, featuring a series of complicatedly entangled characters. Again, there was the precise attention to bodily experience, the restrained but revelatory lyricism that could illuminate the darkest material: “What he wants is not to maim himself but rather to pry open the world, bone it, remove the ugly hardness of it all, the way one might take the spine from a deer or a fish or some other animal snared.”
The Late Americans is a more ambitious, nimbly diffuse novel, moving between a large cast of characters, mainly gay graduate students of dance or creative writing. The campus setting enables the creation of basically similar people who define themselves by difference: who eats meat and who loathes the killing of animals; who applauds the death penalty and who loathes the killing of humans; who has money and who has to earn it by making low-key pornography.
There is an accomplished reticence about race here: it’s revealed stealthily, usually at moments when characters encounter racism. This connects to the novel’s intrepidly questioning vision of identity politics. It opens with Seamus, the white working-class gay poet whose vision of the “Late Americans” provides the book’s title, angry because his classmates reduce a poem to “its increasing cultural salience re: women, re: trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end of the world”. He hates these poetry workshops because he believes that trauma has nothing to do with poetry; that a true poem takes in the world, but bears no sign of the personal material that forges it.
It is a daring move to start the book with this provocation. I wonder if it’s less daring to have it come from a white man. This is a novel that believes in the possibility of great art and of politics and that wants both to be about more than identity. So are Seamus’s pronouncements the thoughts of the novel? It’s never quite clear.
The time span is larger here than in Taylor’s previous books. As with his realist heroes – Tolstoy, Austen, DH Lawrence – weeks or even months pass in a single sentence. Likewise, we are entering new heads right up to the final chapter, and there’s a lonely swimming instructor called Bea who gets just a single section, looking out of her window at some of the other characters. Together, these elements give the novel a sense of contingency: we could as easily be hearing about any other troubled graduate student, a few months earlier or a few months later.
Taylor writes an admirably serious blog on Substack grappling with questions of what the novel is for, where he’s set Rachel Cusk’s notion that novelistic character is outdated against his commitment to the realist novel. He believes that “a character with a body is a social creature” and that the “denuded and tranquilised autofiction narrators of the 2010s” lack full bodily life. I could feel him grappling with these questions in The Late Americans with volatile ambivalence.
Scene by scene these characters have the bodily particularity, the specificity of the great realist novels. But through Taylor’s proliferating characters, he seems to strive towards the kind of homogeneity we find in Cusk’s Outline trilogy, and not just because graduate students are already homogeneous. The dollhouse image is a vision of graduate life but the fear is that it’s also a vision of America, because there is no great world for these students to aspire to. Seamus thinks at one point that they all suffer from identical pain – “small, common things – hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles”. This idea is challenged by the specificity with which violence and cruelty find their targets. There’s a painful scene where a Black woman is shamed for her abortion and then assaulted by a white man. Pain may not be equal after all, but Seamus isn’t undermined – this is all part of the book’s tension.
The Late Americans is baggier than Cusk’s Outline and baggier than Taylor’s own Real Life. It’s a less entirely resolved read than either of them, but for me, this book assures and deepens Taylor’s position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do.
• The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
