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Die letzten Amerikaner: Roman
»Scharfsinnig, intim, urkomisch, ergreifend ... Ein großartig geschriebener Roman über die Verheißung der Jugend, die Suche nach Seelenverwandten und der eigenen Berufung.« Oprah Daily
Es ist ein Jahr des Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah und Fatima bleibt nicht mehr viel Zeit, um über ihre Zukunft zu entscheiden. In ihrem letzten Jahr in Iowa City, einer nicht gerade aufgeweckten Universitätsstadt, fragen die Liebenden und Freunde Worauf setzt man im Leben? Arbeit, Liebe, Geld, Tanz, Poesie? Und wie sieht wahre Verbundenheit in einer Zeit der Unsicherheit und Prekarität aus?
Feinfühlig und unerschrocken erzählt Brandon Taylor von Freundschaft und radikaler Selbstoffenbarung, Herkunft und Ambition – und erweist sich erneut als exzellenter Chronist unserer Gegenwart.
»Taylor verfügt über ein Feingefühl, so unerschöpflich und elegant, wie wir es nur von Klassikern kennen, und schreibt zugleich geschliffen scharf über die Gegenwart.« Emma Cline
»Meisterhaft und einnehmend.« Times Literary Supplement
»Seine Romane sind so groß, dass sie die ganze Welt enthalten.« Esquire
Es ist ein Jahr des Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Noah und Fatima bleibt nicht mehr viel Zeit, um über ihre Zukunft zu entscheiden. In ihrem letzten Jahr in Iowa City, einer nicht gerade aufgeweckten Universitätsstadt, fragen die Liebenden und Freunde Worauf setzt man im Leben? Arbeit, Liebe, Geld, Tanz, Poesie? Und wie sieht wahre Verbundenheit in einer Zeit der Unsicherheit und Prekarität aus?
Feinfühlig und unerschrocken erzählt Brandon Taylor von Freundschaft und radikaler Selbstoffenbarung, Herkunft und Ambition – und erweist sich erneut als exzellenter Chronist unserer Gegenwart.
»Taylor verfügt über ein Feingefühl, so unerschöpflich und elegant, wie wir es nur von Klassikern kennen, und schreibt zugleich geschliffen scharf über die Gegenwart.« Emma Cline
»Meisterhaft und einnehmend.« Times Literary Supplement
»Seine Romane sind so groß, dass sie die ganze Welt enthalten.« Esquire
352 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 23, 2023
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July 28, 2024
I feel a very strong kinship with Taylor’s work. His books have energized both my reading and my thinking in terms of pushing against the unimaginativeness and banality of heteronormative articulations of queerness and queer life. They made available to me a vision of queer being that is not fearful to be unresolved, and further expanded the grammar for what can be thought and imagined in relation to queerness.
This is why I think of The Late Americans as a novel of immanent queerness. By this I don’t mean—and I cannot stress this enough—queerness as a tokenizing mode of representation. Rather, I see this book as a project that understands itself as part of a long tradition of queer critique.
The queer characters in Taylor's novel form complex identities and entanglements that elide restrictions imposed upon queer bodies and go against the prevailing societal sense of how queer people act on themselves and on each other. Queerness, in other words, is crucial for an understanding of the text, but it is also crucially unsettled. This is the central unifying element of Taylor’s work as I see it: it mobilizes queerness to produce a vision of queer life that resists the desire for absolute clarity.
The Late Americans, like Taylor’s debut novel Real Life, is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, paradox, instability, complexity, contradiction, and multivalence. this “archive of feelings”–to borrow an expression from Ann Cvetkovich–adds up to inscribe queerness as a scene of studied ambivalence, and it it precisely this sense of ambivalence that allows Taylor’s characters to retain their right to opacity and maintain a sense of autonomy to disclosure and display. Their journeys, in other words, implicitly symbolize the author's desire to make room for a queerness that exists beyond what queer theorist Lee Edelman describes as “the norms that perpetuate the ‘comfort zone’ of dominant cultural forces.”
The Late Americans inverts the pattern of Taylor’s previous fiction. In this book, Taylor accommodates multiple voices, disrupting the insistent devotion to a singular subject that characterized his debut novel Real Life. The recombinant narratives here constellate around eight different characters, and we follow them as they live “out the wet amphibian prologue to their adult lives.”
Taylor, it must be said, is a brilliant conjurer of the internal disarray of being in your twenties and struggling with no ready blueprint to find your footing on ever-shifting sands: the precarity, the constant buzzing of crisis, the everyday tyrannies of trying to shore up the narrative of your life while worrying about a future that is not yet visible. As in Real Life, most of the narrators here are joined in the kinship of suffering that is academia, and they mesh together in that random way that people who find themselves working and living in tight, enclosing spaces mesh together. As another reviewer noted, “everyone knows someone who knows or is sleeping with or having an affair with somebody else.”
This question of relationality is a central fault line in Taylor’s fiction. Taylor is fearfully attuned to the complexities of intimate arrangements and affiliations made, severed, and remade in the hollow of young adulthood. His observations are so astute to the point of provoking a shock of recognition or even of incredulous laughter.
Even more than Real Life, The Late Americans anatomizes a capacious vision of the social that embraces the messy without foreclosing intimacy. Taylor’s language of the social is binding, jarring, conflicted, and erotic. It makes room for intensity, anger, alienation, neediness, inadequacy, yearning, resentment, and exists entirely beyond a binary judgment of “good” versus “bad.” It insists on co-articulating desire and disillusionment, tenderness and terror, all the forms of betrayal/absence/withholding that we enact upon one another, without trying to resolve the tensions between them. Instead, the novel simply accepts that life is sometimes “all wrong and all right and all fucked up.”
But there is nothing quite simple about being bound to life. Taylor knows this, and in The Late Americans, he makes very palpable the volatile biographies of violence that make people difficult to be or difficult to be with. The novel keys our attention to the powerful ways that trauma, sexual violence, the need or compulsion to be seen, binds people to all kinds of intimate configurations. The characters in The Late Americans hurt people when they’re trying to love them. They are ruthless in their will to mute the suffering of others. They hold on to things that diminish them. They put on masks and cultivate detachment as defence. They desire admiration and it makes them vindictive and afraid.
It is precisely these self-deceptions, these gaps and elisions in the narrative, that power the novel. The dance of shifting between multiple narrators allows The Late Americans to be porous, relational, and aware. It also makes visible the dangers of mapping one’s story in a way that refuses to contend with the story of another. There is no exclusive point of view here. No villains or martyrs. We must therefore build a tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations. How else can we approach our complex entanglements to each other if not cautiously and from multiple angles?
In this sense, what the novel is ultimately after is an ethics of togetherness, a politics of care, of what is required in order to be together. Love, in the words of cultural theorist Laurent Berlant, “always means non-sovereignty.” It requires that we register that which exists beyond the sphere of ourselves, that we relinquish control, expose too much of the self, and invite vulnerability. Everyone knows that to say here is how I love you and here is how it hurts is to risk annihilation.
Nothing in the novel, I think, articulates this dilemma more revealingly than sex. Yes, sex. And there is quite a lot of it here. There is good sex, bad sex, fraught sex, boring sex, destructive sex. When two characters who love each other cannot “get themselves to align,” sex becomes a panacea against the awkward impasse of language. In another instance, sex is a fraught offering of the self for the use of the other, the body reconfigured as a site for freedom. In another, sex is an appeal for recognition, laden with a desire for an intimacy that is denied and disavowed. In another, it is an enactment of the desire to become undone, to be emptied of being in the intensities of bodies that seek, closely press against each other, and then separate. In these moments, sex becomes an opportunity for understanding (and exposing) the characters’ well-rehearsed choreographies of self. In these moments, we understand “how strange,” indeed, “[are] these networks of human relation.”
Because there are so many things to admire about this novel, I almost hesitate to sound a negative note. I do have, however, a couple quibbles to point out. Despite what may have been the author’s best intentions, The Late Americans falls into the narrative bog of trying to make distinct experiences out of characters who easily collapse into each other. Put simply: I had a hard time remembering who was who sometimes. You could find me muttering to myself, “wait, so is this the insufferable capital-punishment-loving vegan boyfriend, or the other equally insufferable adulterer trust-fund boyfriend?” (This does not include Seamus, Fyodor, or Noah, whom I love with my whole best heart, okay)
The female characters in the book also yearn for the same degree of development afforded their male counterparts. Fatima's POV I liked more than Beth's, but both narrations struck me as a little too sanitized, defanged, made toothless somehow. A bit more poison in the pen, I think, would have fleshed them out in more interesting ways.
That said, The Late Americans was a serious pleasure to read, and I love it for the ways that it spoke, with care and beauty, to the fissures that reveal themselves within us in our heartbreaking efforts to place ourselves in the world and arrive at tenderness and care.
This is why I think of The Late Americans as a novel of immanent queerness. By this I don’t mean—and I cannot stress this enough—queerness as a tokenizing mode of representation. Rather, I see this book as a project that understands itself as part of a long tradition of queer critique.
The queer characters in Taylor's novel form complex identities and entanglements that elide restrictions imposed upon queer bodies and go against the prevailing societal sense of how queer people act on themselves and on each other. Queerness, in other words, is crucial for an understanding of the text, but it is also crucially unsettled. This is the central unifying element of Taylor’s work as I see it: it mobilizes queerness to produce a vision of queer life that resists the desire for absolute clarity.
The Late Americans, like Taylor’s debut novel Real Life, is marked by ambiguity, uncertainty, volatility, paradox, instability, complexity, contradiction, and multivalence. this “archive of feelings”–to borrow an expression from Ann Cvetkovich–adds up to inscribe queerness as a scene of studied ambivalence, and it it precisely this sense of ambivalence that allows Taylor’s characters to retain their right to opacity and maintain a sense of autonomy to disclosure and display. Their journeys, in other words, implicitly symbolize the author's desire to make room for a queerness that exists beyond what queer theorist Lee Edelman describes as “the norms that perpetuate the ‘comfort zone’ of dominant cultural forces.”
The Late Americans inverts the pattern of Taylor’s previous fiction. In this book, Taylor accommodates multiple voices, disrupting the insistent devotion to a singular subject that characterized his debut novel Real Life. The recombinant narratives here constellate around eight different characters, and we follow them as they live “out the wet amphibian prologue to their adult lives.”
Taylor, it must be said, is a brilliant conjurer of the internal disarray of being in your twenties and struggling with no ready blueprint to find your footing on ever-shifting sands: the precarity, the constant buzzing of crisis, the everyday tyrannies of trying to shore up the narrative of your life while worrying about a future that is not yet visible. As in Real Life, most of the narrators here are joined in the kinship of suffering that is academia, and they mesh together in that random way that people who find themselves working and living in tight, enclosing spaces mesh together. As another reviewer noted, “everyone knows someone who knows or is sleeping with or having an affair with somebody else.”
This question of relationality is a central fault line in Taylor’s fiction. Taylor is fearfully attuned to the complexities of intimate arrangements and affiliations made, severed, and remade in the hollow of young adulthood. His observations are so astute to the point of provoking a shock of recognition or even of incredulous laughter.
Even more than Real Life, The Late Americans anatomizes a capacious vision of the social that embraces the messy without foreclosing intimacy. Taylor’s language of the social is binding, jarring, conflicted, and erotic. It makes room for intensity, anger, alienation, neediness, inadequacy, yearning, resentment, and exists entirely beyond a binary judgment of “good” versus “bad.” It insists on co-articulating desire and disillusionment, tenderness and terror, all the forms of betrayal/absence/withholding that we enact upon one another, without trying to resolve the tensions between them. Instead, the novel simply accepts that life is sometimes “all wrong and all right and all fucked up.”
But there is nothing quite simple about being bound to life. Taylor knows this, and in The Late Americans, he makes very palpable the volatile biographies of violence that make people difficult to be or difficult to be with. The novel keys our attention to the powerful ways that trauma, sexual violence, the need or compulsion to be seen, binds people to all kinds of intimate configurations. The characters in The Late Americans hurt people when they’re trying to love them. They are ruthless in their will to mute the suffering of others. They hold on to things that diminish them. They put on masks and cultivate detachment as defence. They desire admiration and it makes them vindictive and afraid.
It is precisely these self-deceptions, these gaps and elisions in the narrative, that power the novel. The dance of shifting between multiple narrators allows The Late Americans to be porous, relational, and aware. It also makes visible the dangers of mapping one’s story in a way that refuses to contend with the story of another. There is no exclusive point of view here. No villains or martyrs. We must therefore build a tolerance for a multiplicity of interpretations. How else can we approach our complex entanglements to each other if not cautiously and from multiple angles?
In this sense, what the novel is ultimately after is an ethics of togetherness, a politics of care, of what is required in order to be together. Love, in the words of cultural theorist Laurent Berlant, “always means non-sovereignty.” It requires that we register that which exists beyond the sphere of ourselves, that we relinquish control, expose too much of the self, and invite vulnerability. Everyone knows that to say here is how I love you and here is how it hurts is to risk annihilation.
Nothing in the novel, I think, articulates this dilemma more revealingly than sex. Yes, sex. And there is quite a lot of it here. There is good sex, bad sex, fraught sex, boring sex, destructive sex. When two characters who love each other cannot “get themselves to align,” sex becomes a panacea against the awkward impasse of language. In another instance, sex is a fraught offering of the self for the use of the other, the body reconfigured as a site for freedom. In another, sex is an appeal for recognition, laden with a desire for an intimacy that is denied and disavowed. In another, it is an enactment of the desire to become undone, to be emptied of being in the intensities of bodies that seek, closely press against each other, and then separate. In these moments, sex becomes an opportunity for understanding (and exposing) the characters’ well-rehearsed choreographies of self. In these moments, we understand “how strange,” indeed, “[are] these networks of human relation.”
Because there are so many things to admire about this novel, I almost hesitate to sound a negative note. I do have, however, a couple quibbles to point out. Despite what may have been the author’s best intentions, The Late Americans falls into the narrative bog of trying to make distinct experiences out of characters who easily collapse into each other. Put simply: I had a hard time remembering who was who sometimes. You could find me muttering to myself, “wait, so is this the insufferable capital-punishment-loving vegan boyfriend, or the other equally insufferable adulterer trust-fund boyfriend?” (This does not include Seamus, Fyodor, or Noah, whom I love with my whole best heart, okay)
The female characters in the book also yearn for the same degree of development afforded their male counterparts. Fatima's POV I liked more than Beth's, but both narrations struck me as a little too sanitized, defanged, made toothless somehow. A bit more poison in the pen, I think, would have fleshed them out in more interesting ways.
That said, The Late Americans was a serious pleasure to read, and I love it for the ways that it spoke, with care and beauty, to the fissures that reveal themselves within us in our heartbreaking efforts to place ourselves in the world and arrive at tenderness and care.
January 1, 2023
I liked Taylor's first novel a lot, but this one less so. There is a lot about it that's interesting, it has a throwback feel as if Henry James was writing about a bunch of Gen Z grad students, which you may have gleaned already from the title. Ultimately this one never came together for me the way I would have liked.
There are a lot of characters here and, honestly, I could not keep them all straight to save my life. It starts to feel like we meet gay couple after gay couple, all of them fighting, none of them happy, all of them sleeping with other people. (It was particularly tricky for me that Taylor gives almost all of these men very European names, in the very early stories you meet Seamus, Ivan, Fyodor, Hartjes, and the list goes on.) It was hard to get my bearings, to remember why this particular couple was fighting, if this boyfriend was the dancer or the writer or something else entirely.
The other reason this was a Not For Me book is that most of the characters are getting an MFA and many of them are not financially stable which just left me very stressed out about how none of them seemed to have much of a reason or a plan or anything. This is, clearly, a ME thing not a book thing, but it is still hard for me to get past. Especially when much of the book is about them starting to grapple with what they do now that the MFA is ending.
I have a lot of questions about the Seamus chapters, and I suspect other readers will, too. They are, in many ways, the most interesting. Seamus, a poet, is an asshole. This is clear immediately. Seamus does not realize he's an asshole, he is unable to recognize the way he winds up the women in his cohort and never takes responsibility for it. It would be a very interesting portrait, except that the women in these chapters come off as, well, pretty terrible. They are obsessed with the recounting of personal traumas, insist that every poem must be tied to some horrific past. It kind of makes you want to push their buttons the way Seamus does. Seamus, to me, is a recognizable character and it was interesting to see the ways he justifies himself, the things he cannot see about himself, the insecurities and denials that make him antagonize to avoid being vulnerable. It's an exquisitely done portrait, he comes alive more than anyone else in the book. But the women are so vapid, so single-minded, that these chapters lost some of their impact for me. And since almost all of the characters in the book are men, there is a point where you wonder if there are any women in Iowa City and why the ones we see are all so horrible.
There are a lot of characters here and, honestly, I could not keep them all straight to save my life. It starts to feel like we meet gay couple after gay couple, all of them fighting, none of them happy, all of them sleeping with other people. (It was particularly tricky for me that Taylor gives almost all of these men very European names, in the very early stories you meet Seamus, Ivan, Fyodor, Hartjes, and the list goes on.) It was hard to get my bearings, to remember why this particular couple was fighting, if this boyfriend was the dancer or the writer or something else entirely.
The other reason this was a Not For Me book is that most of the characters are getting an MFA and many of them are not financially stable which just left me very stressed out about how none of them seemed to have much of a reason or a plan or anything. This is, clearly, a ME thing not a book thing, but it is still hard for me to get past. Especially when much of the book is about them starting to grapple with what they do now that the MFA is ending.
I have a lot of questions about the Seamus chapters, and I suspect other readers will, too. They are, in many ways, the most interesting. Seamus, a poet, is an asshole. This is clear immediately. Seamus does not realize he's an asshole, he is unable to recognize the way he winds up the women in his cohort and never takes responsibility for it. It would be a very interesting portrait, except that the women in these chapters come off as, well, pretty terrible. They are obsessed with the recounting of personal traumas, insist that every poem must be tied to some horrific past. It kind of makes you want to push their buttons the way Seamus does. Seamus, to me, is a recognizable character and it was interesting to see the ways he justifies himself, the things he cannot see about himself, the insecurities and denials that make him antagonize to avoid being vulnerable. It's an exquisitely done portrait, he comes alive more than anyone else in the book. But the women are so vapid, so single-minded, that these chapters lost some of their impact for me. And since almost all of the characters in the book are men, there is a point where you wonder if there are any women in Iowa City and why the ones we see are all so horrible.
March 28, 2024
brandon taylor is an auto-buy author for me, and therefore i went out to a bookstore for the express purpose of buying this book on its release date like it was 1949.
what i didn't do was ever review it.
so here is my review:
this was a very dramatic and very Literary Sex Scene heavy book (if you know what that means then you know – otherwise i'm sorry to say i can't explain it and you should be grateful for that). both of those things tend to fall under my No-No List, if you will, but i can't disapprove of anything done by brandon taylor. even his sex scenes, literary as they are, are an acceptable price to pay.
this is roughly half lit fic, half short story collection, and so it makes sense that some were stronger than others. like taylor's other works, this was a doomy gloomy book about doomy gloomy postgrads, but luckily for both of us i can't get enough books about doom and gloom and insufferable artists.
bottom line: i read this book nearly a year ago and my thoughts are exactly the same.
3.5
what i didn't do was ever review it.
so here is my review:
this was a very dramatic and very Literary Sex Scene heavy book (if you know what that means then you know – otherwise i'm sorry to say i can't explain it and you should be grateful for that). both of those things tend to fall under my No-No List, if you will, but i can't disapprove of anything done by brandon taylor. even his sex scenes, literary as they are, are an acceptable price to pay.
this is roughly half lit fic, half short story collection, and so it makes sense that some were stronger than others. like taylor's other works, this was a doomy gloomy book about doomy gloomy postgrads, but luckily for both of us i can't get enough books about doom and gloom and insufferable artists.
bottom line: i read this book nearly a year ago and my thoughts are exactly the same.
3.5
May 12, 2023
“Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed. What he and all the other people on this site were doing was harvesting such moments, not through happenstance or spontaneity but using some apparatus of mass production.”
This latest release by Brandon Taylor reads less like an elaboration and expansion of those themes and dynamics we can find in his previous works and more like a rehash that sadly doesn’t feel as focused, cohesive, or satisfying as neither Real Life nor Filthy Animals. That is not to say that this was an entirely ‘unsatisfying’ read but since I have come to hold Taylor in high esteem and I ‘just’ expected something more from him. In many ways, The Late Americans suffers from an identity crisis: does it want to be a coming-of-age novel following a group of grad students, friends supposedly, a la Real Life? Does it want to be a series of interlinked short stories like Filthy Animals? Could it be both? Maybe, but The Late Americans struck me as a somewhat clumsy attempt at merging these two different structures. With the exception of Seamus, each character is given one single chapter that favors their perspective. These chapters however felt somewhat unfinished, not quite meandering but unfocused, in a way that the short stories in Filthy Animals certainly didn’t. Not only do the many characters populating this novel all happen to have names that are a rarity, or at least not particularly used, in America (seamus, ivan, fyodor, goran, timo), but most of them seemed to be stuck in relationships with all-too-similar fraught dynamics, share the same area of studies or are in the same field (for instance, we have several dancers), and respond and articulate themselves in a manner that seemed strangely alike. If Taylor had focused on a smaller group of friends, like in A Little Life, as opposed to including a couple of people who are ‘friends’ and then some acquaintances or friends-of-friends, maybe then I would have felt more invested in these characters’ lives and their relationships with each other. While I was making my slow way through this I kept thinking how less impactful Happy Together would have been if it had focused on several dysfunctional couples/people rather than honing in on the perspective of three people.
But before I ramble on about the story, and why it ultimately didn't come together (for me), I want to praise Taylor’s style. His unadorned and exacting language intensifies the oppressive, uneasy, dynamics and situations that he explores throughout his narrative. The people Taylor writes of are lonely, unable or unwilling to express themes, their desires, and their fears, and often end up sabotaging their own happiness or their relationships by pushing people away or by picking up fights with them. Many of them are post-grads or in their late twenties and unsure of how to go from their lives as students, to the ‘real world’. Taylor touches on a lot of everyday issues and worries that preoccupy people in their twenties. Are they okay with the person they are? Is the path they are on the one they really want? What do they want out of a relationship? Taylor’s characters seem to perpetually long for connection but are unable to actually see, listen, and make themselves vulnerable to others. Miscommunication, perceived and real slights, insecurity, and jealousy, all of these add tension to the relationships they have with their friends and lovers. Taylor is unremitting when it comes to identifying and probing his character’s flaws, and when doing so he often adopts a clinically detached tone. Yet, despite the cold and impersonal language, there is also a vulnerability, an intimacy even, in the way he hones in on those feelings and thoughts. I will always love the way Taylor is able to articulate and capture those more opaque aspects of a person’s psyche, allowing, when necessary, for ambiguity. Taylor also has a knack for portraying uncomfortable, stultifying interactions, be it an encounter/exchange between two people or a scene taking place at a party or in a class. The discomfort at times it’s almost palpable, and it isn’t always clear what causes this but this uneasiness between his characters is certainly felt, all of the time. I appreciated how Taylor's portrayals of love and friendship are often unforgiving, in that they contain more moments of ugliness, pettiness, and selfishness than say kinship, trust, and kindness. Like in Filthy Animals, Taylor often draws parallels between his characters and animals, ‘beasts’, in a way that is not dehumanizing but that allows us to glimpse, and feel even, the intensity of what his characters are feeling. In addition to being able to bring his readers uncomfortably close to his characters, Taylor can switch to a panoramic view of the people populating his narrative, so that we see them as ‘mere’ players of a larger game, and we realize just how little control they have, or they feel they have, over their own lives.
“These sundry interruptions and redactions, all the skirmishes and misdirection. Like a dog finally catching its tail and chewing it down to the gristle.”
Whereas I read Real Lifeand Filthy Animals over a short period of time, as I found myself invested in the characters’ lives, The Last Americans was less compelling. With the exception of Seamus and Fyodor, I wasn’t drawn to the characters. Timo and Goran, these two guys were very much the same, and their (supposed) friendship only exacerbated my confusion. Then we have the dancers, Ivan and Noah (i think it was them), who are involved with people who, to put it simply, don’t treat them right. Ivan’s partner disapproves of Ivan earning money through pornography, yet he doesn’t seem particularly close or interested in Ivan himself, whereas Noah is with an older guy who resents younger gay generations.
There are three main ‘couples’, and the conflict between them was very much the same. They have different upbringings, different levels of education, different values, and they want different things in life.
Later on, we get two chapters from two women, and these read like a belated inclusion of a female's perspective in this otherwise male-dominated novel. Taylor is more uncertain, and tentative even, when it comes to their characterization, whereas he allows his male characters to be messier.
The character I felt the most invested in also happened to be the one we are probably meant to find least likeable, Seamus. The guy is a sad asshole, a white gay guy with poor social skills who happens to antagonize or set others on edge. Yet, what can I say, I find pathetic characters like Seamus strangely compelling (at one point we get this: "Seamus liked to be used this way. Sometimes he thought the only things he really needed in life were poetry and to be occasionally held down and fucked like dogmeat." and "It was a guy with reddish hair and sad brown eyes. He didn’t look like he belonged to anyone."). He gets two chapters, and I was fooled into believing that because of this we would be given by no means a neat resolution to his arc, but something more satisfying than what we got. Instead, he seems merely forgotten after his second chapter, in a way that was unkind.
A lot of his chapters are sadly wasted on detailing his experiences in this poetry class he goes to. I have said it before, and I will say it again, I am not a fan of creative writing spaces. But I would rather be in one than have to read a fictionalized writing/poetry class/seminar because, more often than not, the authors present us with caricatures of the kind of people that would be in these places. They use meaningless artspeak, usually, they attack the mcs writing or invalidate their work, they feel the need to use performative language to appear morally superior and so on. Sure, in real life, you might get one, two, or even three people, in your class who use buzzwords to appear more enlightened than others and wear edgy tote bags that announce that they don’t give a shit about your ‘fragile masculinity’ or whatever, but a whole class?
I just didn't get the point of those scenes. In a way we are meant to see just how wrapped up in himself Seamus is, how he often expresses himself in a way that riles people up, and of his struggles to produce poems that conform to his peers’ expectations: they see poems as inherently personal and political, a cathartic art form, a way to talk about their traumas and personal experiences, whereas Seamus finds the idea of mining his past or drawing from his own personal experiences as banal (i guess he is more of an art for art’s sake kind of guy). The tension between him and the rest of the class had potential, but Taylor goes too heavy-handed in his characterisation of these women who Seamus calls ‘witches’ (something that is meant to emphasize how childish and on the defensive he is with them but frankly felt fitting). They are insufferable. Horrible even but in a way that comes across as less ‘clever satire’ and more ‘unfunny caricature’…in fact I found Taylor’s portrayal of these women to be devoid of subtlety, worse, mean-spirited even, the kind of sketch that you’d expect from people who will go and on about ‘wokeness’ and ‘man-hating feminist’ who are liable to 'screech' 'stop oppressing me' whenever a totally decent guy is just being nice. Whenever Seamus would open his mouth, sure, sometimes to make some provocative comment, things would just escalate in a less credible way than say the other fights and disagreements that populate this novel. Seamus writes a poem about the war, (i or ii, I cannot recall), about a nun (i think it was a nun), and expresses frustration with the way the other poets in his class elevate and romanticize trauma (i also hate the kind of thinking that leads some to see trauma as character-building or a source of ‘depth’ or ‘specialness’...), this leads to him being accused of being racist, misogynist, victim-blaming, and so on. Sure, traumatic experiences can lead to the production/creation of cathartic art, and this can help someone heal or take ‘control’, or whatever, but here the women are unanimous in their consensus that trauma leads to meaningful art and that if you express negative or critical feedback is you are invalidating the poet’s experiences etc. I think that there was potential to have a discussion about what art is and what art ought to be, but Taylor makes these women into such obvious one-note figures that I had very hard time 'believing' in them, let alone the opinions they expressed. Anyway, ironically enough, as they accuse Seamus of this and that and make disparaging comments about him and his poetry, they are themselves doing the ‘invalidating’.
I just hated these scenes, the women were too cartoonish, in their ganging up on Seamus, one of the only two male poets (at one point one continues to tell him ‘you don’t get to speak to me’). I wanted to learn more about him, to see him at his job where he makes clumsy attempts at talking to his colleagues, to see him outside of that cursed poetry class.
Yet, despite my hating the way Taylor portrayed this class, I did find Seamus to be the most well-developed character. He is very much flawed, lost, and seems resentful of the notion that being ‘privileged’.
I found his two chapters to be compelling, despite feeling uneasy about him or the way he behaves with others.
“But no one had a happy childhood. No one had a good life. Human pain existed in a vast supply, and people took from it like grain from a barn. There was pain for you and pain for you and pain for you— agony enough for everyone. The pain of his childhood was of such a common source that it embarrassed him. Perhaps it was this that he resented in the work of his peers. It wasn’t that their lives were worse than his or that his life was better than theirs— it was that they all had the same pain , the same hurt, and he didn’t think anyone should go around pretending it was something more than it was: the routine operation of the universe. Small, common things— hurt feelings, cruel parents, strange and wearisome troubles.”
The other character that stood out was Fyodor. He is a ‘townie’ who works at a ‘leaner’ in a beef plant, and he is in an on-and-off again relationship with Timo, who Fyodor describes as “irritatingly middle class” and who often picks fights with Fyodor over his job, how unethical it is, and so forth. The two are in a love/hate relationship, drifting apart, arguing over petty nothing-things, breaking up, missing each other, getting back together, and reverting to the same tired cycle where neither feels understood by the other. Sadly Fyodor is also forgotten even if we glimpse or hear of him in later chapters.
“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.”
The other lads, well. With the exception of the two girls, whose povs felt strangely ‘sanitized’ compared to the men, read very much too samey. I had a hard time distinguishing these guys from one another, and this wasn’t helped by the way they seem to use the same imagery or vocabulary to evaluate and understand the world around them, their sense of self, the currents of their relationships, sexual and non, and so forth. I just wished the novel could have focused on a smaller cast of characters, maybe switching between Fyodor and Seamus, or focusing on an actual group of friends because the whole dancer group did not strike me as actual friends.
While I do appreciate how Taylor explores power dynamics, codependency, alienation, loneliness, destructiveness, ennui, race and class disparities, as well as his cutting social commentary. As always he demonstrates a penchant for those inscrutable, occasionally petty, sometimes nasty feelings and urges that lead fights, heartaches, and misery. Yet, Taylor's critique of academia and his observation on the 'real world', lacked the urgency and depth of his other works.
June 10, 2023
"The Late Americans" has a lot of bad sex scenes, and regardless of one's prudishness, it cannot be denied that these sequences capture profound truths about the characters. Unfortunately, these ( mostly gay) characters did not hold Brandon Taylor's attention for long, as he mostly abandons them after each chapter (short story). Yep, I don't think this is a novel and the last three stories also lost my interest.
June 8, 2023
At its core The Late Americans is an unflinchingly honest account of personhood and its many tribulations.
We are introduced to a host of characters, each connected by a proclivity for the arts, and an ostensible aversion to stability. With each new perspective, previous judgements shift; characters who once seemed indefensible evoke pity, and characters you have grown to love spark outrage.
Brandon Taylor doesn’t write characters, he writes people. Flawed, capricious, vulnerable people. His writing is deliberate yet achingly human - reminiscent of Douglas Stuart and Hanya Yanagihara.
As always with novels like these, my singular difficulty with this book is that I wish there were more of it. While Taylor did an incredible job of creating numerous characters with depth and complexity, I didn’t have time to form a true attachment to any of them. While some characters stood out to me, others faded into the background. And though not everybody can be the main character (in this case there are none) I found myself aching for something to hold on to.
But perhaps that’s the point.
(3.5 stars rounded up)
TWs:
Sexual Assault, Abuse (Sexual, Physical, Emotional) Violence, Toxic Relationships, Homophobia, Misogyny, Misogynoir, Racism, Classism, Death (Parent), Kidnapping, Alcohol, Drug use, Abortion
We are introduced to a host of characters, each connected by a proclivity for the arts, and an ostensible aversion to stability. With each new perspective, previous judgements shift; characters who once seemed indefensible evoke pity, and characters you have grown to love spark outrage.
Brandon Taylor doesn’t write characters, he writes people. Flawed, capricious, vulnerable people. His writing is deliberate yet achingly human - reminiscent of Douglas Stuart and Hanya Yanagihara.
As always with novels like these, my singular difficulty with this book is that I wish there were more of it. While Taylor did an incredible job of creating numerous characters with depth and complexity, I didn’t have time to form a true attachment to any of them. While some characters stood out to me, others faded into the background. And though not everybody can be the main character (in this case there are none) I found myself aching for something to hold on to.
But perhaps that’s the point.
(3.5 stars rounded up)
TWs:
Sexual Assault, Abuse (Sexual, Physical, Emotional) Violence, Toxic Relationships, Homophobia, Misogyny, Misogynoir, Racism, Classism, Death (Parent), Kidnapping, Alcohol, Drug use, Abortion
November 3, 2023
1.5, rounded up.
I really enjoyed Taylor's first acclaimed Booker-shortlisted Real Life, but skipped his second book, Filthy Animals, since short stories are my least favorite fiction format. I was hoping for a return to his former glory with this, but alas - though it's being marketed as a novel, perhaps because the stories did not sell as well, and novels tend to get more awards recognition - this is really that odd duckling of the book world: interconnected/linked short stories.
The Booker rules requires that such a nominee have a 'strong through line interconnecting the stories' and I doubt this really qualifies - not only is the connection tenuous at best (mainly the setting at Iowa University), but these don't even much qualify as stories - they are more character sketches, and though a few characters do pop up sometimes in multiple stories - there are no main protagonists nor any particular through plotline. I knew I was in trouble when NONE of the three characters mentioned in the synopsis had appeared till one third of the way through the book!
And even as character sketches these are - well, sketchy. Oftentimes a character is introduced, and their description finally comes 20, 30, 50 pages later - so I found it incredibly difficult to differentiate and keep them all straight - compounded by the fact that almost all of the male characters are gay - NOT that I have any objection to such, it just seemed odd that even in a graduate arts program there are NO straight guys.
There are two bickering gay couples - Timo and Fyodor are one, and Goran and Ivan are the other .... I think ... and I kept having to backtrack to remember which was which - they were virtually interchangeable. Too bad the Literary Review stopped giving out their annual 'Bad Sex in Fiction' Award in 2019, as this contains multiple candidates that would be shoe-ins for THAT prestigious prize.
Maybe I am just too far removed in time and place to appreciate a campus novel anymore (I finished my Ph.D. program 30 years back), but these stories just seemed to lack any universal relevance or point to them. The prose is fine, though unremarkable, and Taylor retains his penchant for realistic dialogue - but other than that, there is little to recommend here. Frankly, I was plain bored and contemplated DNF-ing it many times.
I really enjoyed Taylor's first acclaimed Booker-shortlisted Real Life, but skipped his second book, Filthy Animals, since short stories are my least favorite fiction format. I was hoping for a return to his former glory with this, but alas - though it's being marketed as a novel, perhaps because the stories did not sell as well, and novels tend to get more awards recognition - this is really that odd duckling of the book world: interconnected/linked short stories.
The Booker rules requires that such a nominee have a 'strong through line interconnecting the stories' and I doubt this really qualifies - not only is the connection tenuous at best (mainly the setting at Iowa University), but these don't even much qualify as stories - they are more character sketches, and though a few characters do pop up sometimes in multiple stories - there are no main protagonists nor any particular through plotline. I knew I was in trouble when NONE of the three characters mentioned in the synopsis had appeared till one third of the way through the book!
And even as character sketches these are - well, sketchy. Oftentimes a character is introduced, and their description finally comes 20, 30, 50 pages later - so I found it incredibly difficult to differentiate and keep them all straight - compounded by the fact that almost all of the male characters are gay - NOT that I have any objection to such, it just seemed odd that even in a graduate arts program there are NO straight guys.
There are two bickering gay couples - Timo and Fyodor are one, and Goran and Ivan are the other .... I think ... and I kept having to backtrack to remember which was which - they were virtually interchangeable. Too bad the Literary Review stopped giving out their annual 'Bad Sex in Fiction' Award in 2019, as this contains multiple candidates that would be shoe-ins for THAT prestigious prize.
Maybe I am just too far removed in time and place to appreciate a campus novel anymore (I finished my Ph.D. program 30 years back), but these stories just seemed to lack any universal relevance or point to them. The prose is fine, though unremarkable, and Taylor retains his penchant for realistic dialogue - but other than that, there is little to recommend here. Frankly, I was plain bored and contemplated DNF-ing it many times.
May 29, 2023
1.5
From skimming a few reviews I see I fall into the minority camp of really not liking this book.
For me it was a loose collection of ramblings interspersed with casual violence and a lot of oral sex. I got very bored with the interminable references to oral sex - it reminded me very much of Miriam Margolyes' autobiography which I also disliked.
So in the notes for this book I've scribbled "exhaustingly introspective", "characters the same so I muddle them up", "headache" and then "lorem ipsum" alongside "pretentious and derivative". The last two are used in the book itself but its how I'd sum it up - placeholder gibberish until the real dialogue gets put in and the pretentious comment is one used by one of the dancers (or poets) about someone else's work.
Frankly I did not like very much at all about this. I see that Brandon Taylor has a large following. I won't be one of them. The whole thing gave me multiple tension headaches, took me 10 days to read and only the last ten percent was somewhat interesting.
I don't mind a book that goes nowhere but the writing has to be better than this for me.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC but Late Americans was simply not for me.
From skimming a few reviews I see I fall into the minority camp of really not liking this book.
For me it was a loose collection of ramblings interspersed with casual violence and a lot of oral sex. I got very bored with the interminable references to oral sex - it reminded me very much of Miriam Margolyes' autobiography which I also disliked.
So in the notes for this book I've scribbled "exhaustingly introspective", "characters the same so I muddle them up", "headache" and then "lorem ipsum" alongside "pretentious and derivative". The last two are used in the book itself but its how I'd sum it up - placeholder gibberish until the real dialogue gets put in and the pretentious comment is one used by one of the dancers (or poets) about someone else's work.
Frankly I did not like very much at all about this. I see that Brandon Taylor has a large following. I won't be one of them. The whole thing gave me multiple tension headaches, took me 10 days to read and only the last ten percent was somewhat interesting.
I don't mind a book that goes nowhere but the writing has to be better than this for me.
Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC but Late Americans was simply not for me.
May 23, 2023
bleak, mundane, beautiful
July 3, 2023
I so admired the intensity and commitment of Brandon Taylor’s portrait of everyday life in a university town in Iowa, moving between students and townspeople he probes the tensions between these disparate communities and explores the interior lives of a selection of its residents. This wonderfully disciplined piece, with writing that has an arresting clarity and poignancy, features a revolving cast of characters whose lives overlap or intertwine. Characters who’re all striving to carve out a space for themselves in a profoundly challenging society, together they form a microcosm of contemporary American society with its myriad obstacles to happiness. A place where divides of age, class, race, and, crucially, money dictate what kinds of dreams someone may or may not dare to entertain.
Although Taylor builds towards a cautiously optimistic conclusion, there’s an overwhelming sense of melancholy here, of struggle, of lack of connection, of confusion. The students, mainly dancers and creative writers, are haunted by lingering cultural notions of art as somehow freeing or above commerce while taunted by the realisation that this is an era in which art has no real currency, except its possible transformation into commodity. The local community is also struggling and even academics are frequent flyers at the town’s foodbanks. Graduate student Seamus wants to write poetry but his vision is out of step with his socially and politically conscious classmates and the prevailing trend for creative writing as ersatz therapy, yet he clings to his unfashionable ideas about form and about language, while trying to find ways to fund his studies and desperately trying to process an incident of horrifying abuse. Bea lives next door to dancer Noah, watching him and his friends from her window, isolated and just about getting by, she’s a prime example of America’s lost middle classes, her education leading to a precarious existence tutoring the children of the town’s richer families.
Taylor’s narrative is highly referential and intertextual: from the nod to Henry James in the title to the echoes of Russian writer Garshin and of Raymond Carver’s “dirty realism” frequently reflected in Taylor’s style – even sending me back to reread Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” As in Carver’s fiction, love is an elusive, near-indefinable experience for Taylor’s characters, sex is much easier to come by, couples come together yet find any sense of real or lasting connection almost impossible, yet still they’re driven on in their quest for some kind of meaningful union sometimes glimpsed in rare, fleeting moments of tenderness. Taylor has talked about wanting to write fiction that captures “the rhythms of living in the world” and, at least for me, this accomplished, questioning piece definitely achieves that goal.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Jonathan Cape for an ARC
Although Taylor builds towards a cautiously optimistic conclusion, there’s an overwhelming sense of melancholy here, of struggle, of lack of connection, of confusion. The students, mainly dancers and creative writers, are haunted by lingering cultural notions of art as somehow freeing or above commerce while taunted by the realisation that this is an era in which art has no real currency, except its possible transformation into commodity. The local community is also struggling and even academics are frequent flyers at the town’s foodbanks. Graduate student Seamus wants to write poetry but his vision is out of step with his socially and politically conscious classmates and the prevailing trend for creative writing as ersatz therapy, yet he clings to his unfashionable ideas about form and about language, while trying to find ways to fund his studies and desperately trying to process an incident of horrifying abuse. Bea lives next door to dancer Noah, watching him and his friends from her window, isolated and just about getting by, she’s a prime example of America’s lost middle classes, her education leading to a precarious existence tutoring the children of the town’s richer families.
Taylor’s narrative is highly referential and intertextual: from the nod to Henry James in the title to the echoes of Russian writer Garshin and of Raymond Carver’s “dirty realism” frequently reflected in Taylor’s style – even sending me back to reread Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” As in Carver’s fiction, love is an elusive, near-indefinable experience for Taylor’s characters, sex is much easier to come by, couples come together yet find any sense of real or lasting connection almost impossible, yet still they’re driven on in their quest for some kind of meaningful union sometimes glimpsed in rare, fleeting moments of tenderness. Taylor has talked about wanting to write fiction that captures “the rhythms of living in the world” and, at least for me, this accomplished, questioning piece definitely achieves that goal.
Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Jonathan Cape for an ARC
June 6, 2023
What even is this book? Is it a campus novel? A Bildungsroman? A soap opera? A clapback at higher education? A social commentary? And if it’s the latter, what is it commenting on, and what exactly is the social issue? These are all valid ponderings, yet I don’t have the answer to any one of them. But here’s the thing: I don’t care. I adored this novel anyway, even though I have no idea what it is or what it was trying to do.
I guess it would be easy to simplify this novel as being about a bunch of bed-hopping artiste students, who spend their time feeling aimless and ignored within the larger world. And perhaps this simplification is really all there is to it. Who am I to say otherwise? But, for me, it is a dazzling reading experience, being in the presence of all this restlessness. These characters are just on the cusp of making their mark in the grand world. We’re witnessing the stage where they are unsure of themselves and their place in the world. Most are talented, but they’re at a point where they either underestimate their worth, question their gifts, or realize that they need to give up on their dreams.
There’s something about this book that felt a bit old school, like Taylor was trying to take on the style of classic literature but tweak it for the millennial and Gen Z crowd, although I’d say maybe more millennial. Ie: One thing I noticed is that social media and cell phones don’t play a huge part in the book. They are present but other than a chilling text message in the latter half, they don’t seem to play an integral role in the story. People show up to places without texting, people randomly run into each other, many don’t think to use their phones in emergency moments. This leads me to believe that Taylor was aiming to make this a timeless story; something for the ages.
I’ll admit, with a book with such a huge cast of characters like this, some characters kinda get lost in the shuffle. At moments, I was like: wait, whose boyfriend is he again? Whose side chick is he again? And as to be expected, some characters are more compelling than others: for me, those would be Noah, Seamus, Fatima, Fyodor. But overall, I was swept up in the frantic energy of it all.
Weirdly enough, there was something utterly “romantic” about this book, even though nothing remotely romantic happens within it. (These are friends who are broody and moody, who lash out, who betray and antagonize each other, who are envious… but ultimately they’re all insecure. And that touch of vulnerability did all the wonders). “Romantic” because it’s a dizzying look at time and place; where everything seems possible, that era when we’re lucky to spend our last days basking in that optimism before the shit really hits the fan.
I guess it would be easy to simplify this novel as being about a bunch of bed-hopping artiste students, who spend their time feeling aimless and ignored within the larger world. And perhaps this simplification is really all there is to it. Who am I to say otherwise? But, for me, it is a dazzling reading experience, being in the presence of all this restlessness. These characters are just on the cusp of making their mark in the grand world. We’re witnessing the stage where they are unsure of themselves and their place in the world. Most are talented, but they’re at a point where they either underestimate their worth, question their gifts, or realize that they need to give up on their dreams.
There’s something about this book that felt a bit old school, like Taylor was trying to take on the style of classic literature but tweak it for the millennial and Gen Z crowd, although I’d say maybe more millennial. Ie: One thing I noticed is that social media and cell phones don’t play a huge part in the book. They are present but other than a chilling text message in the latter half, they don’t seem to play an integral role in the story. People show up to places without texting, people randomly run into each other, many don’t think to use their phones in emergency moments. This leads me to believe that Taylor was aiming to make this a timeless story; something for the ages.
I’ll admit, with a book with such a huge cast of characters like this, some characters kinda get lost in the shuffle. At moments, I was like: wait, whose boyfriend is he again? Whose side chick is he again? And as to be expected, some characters are more compelling than others: for me, those would be Noah, Seamus, Fatima, Fyodor. But overall, I was swept up in the frantic energy of it all.
Weirdly enough, there was something utterly “romantic” about this book, even though nothing remotely romantic happens within it. (These are friends who are broody and moody, who lash out, who betray and antagonize each other, who are envious… but ultimately they’re all insecure. And that touch of vulnerability did all the wonders). “Romantic” because it’s a dizzying look at time and place; where everything seems possible, that era when we’re lucky to spend our last days basking in that optimism before the shit really hits the fan.
March 24, 2025
That’ll teach ME to praise a book before I’ve finished it. I don’t know man. What an excellent first chapter, and what a way for the rest of the book to implode.
The Late Americans kicks off with a slow broil about the role of poetry. A disillusioned grad student vents his frustrations about modern poetry and what he perceives is a pretentious centering of the self combined with a reliance on the old masters as a substitute for meaning. We follow him through an awful day as he continues to turn over these critiques. The day gets worse. At the close of the chapter, he sits down and reaches for the only way he knows how to express his own anguish: poetry referencing the same Greek myth he had condemned. It’s a really neat little story about how we relate to one another and to art, and Taylor’s line by line writing is excellent. These perfect little jeweled sentences falling into order.
The rest of the book is…well…a 300-page muddied slog. Each chapter revolves around another person who sits adjacent to this graduate school. Many of them are artists or performers. Most are queer, plenty struggle with money or direction. But most importantly, they all SOUND the exact same. Each perspective squares itself around race, class, and sexuality in ways that feel harmonious if not exactly similar. Each chapter maintains the same bleak, listless tone as the characters stumble through failed relationships. The result is a bland pudding where no one is actually DOING anything or SAYING anything, and it’s possible that this, too, can be used to make a more interesting statement, but Taylor is pursuing ideas and sentiments without real challenge to their meaning or application. I just…don’t really understand why we have all these different characters who are not different.
Some other thoughts:
- A lot of people accuse Brandon Taylor of being chronically online, which I don’t think is true, but I DO think that his prose is designed to be cropped out of context and posted in tumblr web weaving poems. So many lines here feel like they float above the text because they make no reference to it. There’s no compelling plot, emotion, or character for them to attach to/be motivated by, so the writing feels insubstantial, almost hyper-aware of its own audience. These beautiful sentences are meant to be read by YOU, reader, not experienced by the characters.
- Abortion plotline handled like shit. Tacky, trite, borderline offensive.
- Don’t you know that if sex is fun it can’t be literary.
The Late Americans kicks off with a slow broil about the role of poetry. A disillusioned grad student vents his frustrations about modern poetry and what he perceives is a pretentious centering of the self combined with a reliance on the old masters as a substitute for meaning. We follow him through an awful day as he continues to turn over these critiques. The day gets worse. At the close of the chapter, he sits down and reaches for the only way he knows how to express his own anguish: poetry referencing the same Greek myth he had condemned. It’s a really neat little story about how we relate to one another and to art, and Taylor’s line by line writing is excellent. These perfect little jeweled sentences falling into order.
The rest of the book is…well…a 300-page muddied slog. Each chapter revolves around another person who sits adjacent to this graduate school. Many of them are artists or performers. Most are queer, plenty struggle with money or direction. But most importantly, they all SOUND the exact same. Each perspective squares itself around race, class, and sexuality in ways that feel harmonious if not exactly similar. Each chapter maintains the same bleak, listless tone as the characters stumble through failed relationships. The result is a bland pudding where no one is actually DOING anything or SAYING anything, and it’s possible that this, too, can be used to make a more interesting statement, but Taylor is pursuing ideas and sentiments without real challenge to their meaning or application. I just…don’t really understand why we have all these different characters who are not different.
Some other thoughts:
- A lot of people accuse Brandon Taylor of being chronically online, which I don’t think is true, but I DO think that his prose is designed to be cropped out of context and posted in tumblr web weaving poems. So many lines here feel like they float above the text because they make no reference to it. There’s no compelling plot, emotion, or character for them to attach to/be motivated by, so the writing feels insubstantial, almost hyper-aware of its own audience. These beautiful sentences are meant to be read by YOU, reader, not experienced by the characters.
- Abortion plotline handled like shit. Tacky, trite, borderline offensive.
- Don’t you know that if sex is fun it can’t be literary.
December 11, 2022
Somehow the blurb of The Late Americans attracted me immensely, but while reading, that attraction subsided. Instead, I became restless and sometimes wanted a chapter to end, but then it kept going on and on and on.
First of all, the writing is gorgeous. If I would only rate the writing, this would have easily been a five-star rating. But beautiful writing alone is not enough for me. I couldn’t connect to all those characters as much as I wanted to, and some characters I just didn’t care enough about. Add those long chapters (nine, each from a different point of view) and the interlinked stories, and I got lost somehow.
So, this book is not for me, but it could easily be one for you, especially if you like interlinked stories, fabulous writing, and complex characters.
Thank you, Carmella Lowkis, from Penguin Random House UK, for providing me with the ARC. I’m so sorry I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.
Actual rating 2.5 stars, rounded up because of the writing.
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First of all, the writing is gorgeous. If I would only rate the writing, this would have easily been a five-star rating. But beautiful writing alone is not enough for me. I couldn’t connect to all those characters as much as I wanted to, and some characters I just didn’t care enough about. Add those long chapters (nine, each from a different point of view) and the interlinked stories, and I got lost somehow.
So, this book is not for me, but it could easily be one for you, especially if you like interlinked stories, fabulous writing, and complex characters.
Thank you, Carmella Lowkis, from Penguin Random House UK, for providing me with the ARC. I’m so sorry I didn’t like it as much as I wanted to.
Actual rating 2.5 stars, rounded up because of the writing.
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December 10, 2022
I’m very conflicted on this book. On a scene level, I really love it for the same reasons I loved both Real Life and Filthy Animals - it’s beautiful writing about complicated people at pivotal moments in their lives, struggling with intimacy and finding a sense of purpose and being seen and reconciling art and life. Great stuff.
But on a book level, I found this really frustrating. I think the obvious comparison here is La Boheme, but while La Boheme has like six characters and is really ultimately about two, this has one thousand, the majority of whom get a backstory. The first chapter I was really invested, and then in the second we started over with a new group. This in itself is totally fine and I love a perspective jump, but all the way down to the last chapter we were inhabiting new personas - most of whom kind of bled together for me (kind of cynical, mostly gay men, mostly grad students, mostly in the arts, mostly with very eccentric names?, who are generous with physical affection yet incredibly guarded emotionally). I had to keep reminding myself who was who, which is fine, but I also was waiting for like, any sort of conclusion or revisiting of half these characters after their backstories were first introduced in their chapters, which just didn’t come (justice for Fyodor!). It seemed like these stories were going to converge in a way they just…didn’t mostly.
So maybe it’s a little on me for just wanting this book to be something it wasn’t really, but I just would much rather have gotten more out of fewer relationships. It felt like a bunch of really promising but ultimately false starts, and I think for a book to be such a Whitman’s Sampler of characters, it would benefit from a less homogeneous group to sample from.
But on a book level, I found this really frustrating. I think the obvious comparison here is La Boheme, but while La Boheme has like six characters and is really ultimately about two, this has one thousand, the majority of whom get a backstory. The first chapter I was really invested, and then in the second we started over with a new group. This in itself is totally fine and I love a perspective jump, but all the way down to the last chapter we were inhabiting new personas - most of whom kind of bled together for me (kind of cynical, mostly gay men, mostly grad students, mostly in the arts, mostly with very eccentric names?, who are generous with physical affection yet incredibly guarded emotionally). I had to keep reminding myself who was who, which is fine, but I also was waiting for like, any sort of conclusion or revisiting of half these characters after their backstories were first introduced in their chapters, which just didn’t come (justice for Fyodor!). It seemed like these stories were going to converge in a way they just…didn’t mostly.
So maybe it’s a little on me for just wanting this book to be something it wasn’t really, but I just would much rather have gotten more out of fewer relationships. It felt like a bunch of really promising but ultimately false starts, and I think for a book to be such a Whitman’s Sampler of characters, it would benefit from a less homogeneous group to sample from.
June 23, 2023
i am literally so seamus coded omg
May 4, 2024
The Late Americans is a brilliant and exhilarating novel by one of my favorite authors, Brandon Taylor. This thought provoking, coming of age story made me nostalgic for the friendships I had in my 20s. I loved the characters in this book, they're flawed, complex, relatable, and full of depth. I also loved the LGBTQ representation, the found/chosen family aspect.
I've read all of Taylor's work and all 3 of his books have been solid 5 star reads for me. The Late Americans is definitely one of the most unforgettable reads I've read recently and I highly recommend it, along with his prior works Real Life and Filthy Animals.
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is now available in all formats! A massive thanks to Riverhead Books for the gifted copy
I've read all of Taylor's work and all 3 of his books have been solid 5 star reads for me. The Late Americans is definitely one of the most unforgettable reads I've read recently and I highly recommend it, along with his prior works Real Life and Filthy Animals.
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor is now available in all formats! A massive thanks to Riverhead Books for the gifted copy
October 6, 2024
life is short... & For a dollar, name a woman
July 16, 2023
this is the worst fucking book i have ever read. breaking: 5 gay liberal arts students are shocked /shocked/ when they have to work to have money bc they’re poor. and they all suck and fuck each other. every single character in this book is so incredibly insufferable and pretentious they seriously need to be shot at. throw in buzzwords like “Marxist” and you’ve got a shitty novel about 21st century Iowa City. AVOID THIS BOOK AT ALL COSTS. Read this on the Amtrak back to get it done with guys I really cant stress how pretentious and overwritten this is. the characters are not dynamic they’re all the same. this book is utter fucking trash i’ll probs use it as fire kindling.
January 9, 2023
6th book of 2023. Artist for this review is American artist Taryn Simon (b. 1975)
The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor's second novel following his previous Real Life, and they share many similar themes. Where Real Life focussed on one man's experience, Wallace, at university, The Late Americans focusses on many (perhaps too many). Taylor moves, chapter by chapter, through a friend group, into acquaintances, etc., moving around to different students all going through a lot of the same sort of thing (struggles with their art (be it writing, dance, painting), abuse, sexuality). Most of the characters in the novel are gay as Wallace was before them. My main complaint with the novel as a whole is that a lot of the characters felt almost interchangeable. There were so many friends and most of them felt fairly similar to one another. Change out their art or the form of their abuse and they were mostly indistinguishable. Maybe there's a comment on reality there, but it made for repetitive reading.
Folder: Express Highways, 2013
Another is that every conversation was exhausting to read. I don't know if this is truly indicative of American friendships but they are very honest and very cruel to one another, constantly. Almost every conversation in the book runs for a few lines before one of them says something spiky and someone else says "Fuck you". Even in the university workshop scenes, with a professor there with them, they are making abuse jokes and saying "Fuck you" to each other. None of the characters were overly likeable, which is not an issue I have on the whole. I found their loneliness and their struggles to communicate (however frustrating this also was) relatable. Eventually though, nearing the 300 pages of the novel, you can see where every conversation is going, that rarely they are nice to each other, and hell, even when they are nice to each other, someone still gets the bright idea to say "Fuck you". Finally, in their large friendship, almost every guy had slept with every other guy. To the point where they are dating one but then kissing another, or having sex with two of them... because I found the characters fairly indistinguishable, I struggled to follow who was actually dating who and therefore who was sleeping with who. Noah, for example, I think sleeps with almost everyone else. Again, maybe that's true to life.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, 2008–11
When I read Real Life I commented on the writing being quite MA/MFA. I thought mostly the same here. At times you could feel Taylor stretching and trying too hard so the sentences came off poorly. Not to say he's a bad writer, there were some good lines, but generally I feel his writing is quite forced, pushing for the poetic. I don't know how it is one can read and sense that. Perhaps it's a lack of confidence you can feel through the words. I'm not sure. Some of his sentence choices were still very MA/MFA, repeated words for effect, single line sentences for extra dramatic vigour, rhetoric questions ending paragraphs that felt a little corny. By far the most repetitive strain of conversation was to do with money, and Taylor throws around the word piety a lot. Almost every character complains about another's piety at some point. Middle-class. Trust-fund. There's a lot of venomous money talk. Again, perhaps it's bigger in America. In England, no one talks about money, especially not their parents' money with friends.
So, if you like the sound of reading about a group of friends navigating current America, sex, abuse, etc., then this is your book. There are some fairly graphic sex scenes, lots of "Fuck you"s... It's OK. I think there are better contemporary books I get more out of. Last year I read Rooney's newest, Beautiful World, Where Are You and was surprised by how good it is. I'd rather just read that again. I can't decide if this was better than Real Life though, I think it is. Thank you to Random House for the advance copy.
The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor's second novel following his previous Real Life, and they share many similar themes. Where Real Life focussed on one man's experience, Wallace, at university, The Late Americans focusses on many (perhaps too many). Taylor moves, chapter by chapter, through a friend group, into acquaintances, etc., moving around to different students all going through a lot of the same sort of thing (struggles with their art (be it writing, dance, painting), abuse, sexuality). Most of the characters in the novel are gay as Wallace was before them. My main complaint with the novel as a whole is that a lot of the characters felt almost interchangeable. There were so many friends and most of them felt fairly similar to one another. Change out their art or the form of their abuse and they were mostly indistinguishable. Maybe there's a comment on reality there, but it made for repetitive reading.
Folder: Express Highways, 2013
Another is that every conversation was exhausting to read. I don't know if this is truly indicative of American friendships but they are very honest and very cruel to one another, constantly. Almost every conversation in the book runs for a few lines before one of them says something spiky and someone else says "Fuck you". Even in the university workshop scenes, with a professor there with them, they are making abuse jokes and saying "Fuck you" to each other. None of the characters were overly likeable, which is not an issue I have on the whole. I found their loneliness and their struggles to communicate (however frustrating this also was) relatable. Eventually though, nearing the 300 pages of the novel, you can see where every conversation is going, that rarely they are nice to each other, and hell, even when they are nice to each other, someone still gets the bright idea to say "Fuck you". Finally, in their large friendship, almost every guy had slept with every other guy. To the point where they are dating one but then kissing another, or having sex with two of them... because I found the characters fairly indistinguishable, I struggled to follow who was actually dating who and therefore who was sleeping with who. Noah, for example, I think sleeps with almost everyone else. Again, maybe that's true to life.
A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I-XVIII, 2008–11
When I read Real Life I commented on the writing being quite MA/MFA. I thought mostly the same here. At times you could feel Taylor stretching and trying too hard so the sentences came off poorly. Not to say he's a bad writer, there were some good lines, but generally I feel his writing is quite forced, pushing for the poetic. I don't know how it is one can read and sense that. Perhaps it's a lack of confidence you can feel through the words. I'm not sure. Some of his sentence choices were still very MA/MFA, repeated words for effect, single line sentences for extra dramatic vigour, rhetoric questions ending paragraphs that felt a little corny. By far the most repetitive strain of conversation was to do with money, and Taylor throws around the word piety a lot. Almost every character complains about another's piety at some point. Middle-class. Trust-fund. There's a lot of venomous money talk. Again, perhaps it's bigger in America. In England, no one talks about money, especially not their parents' money with friends.
So, if you like the sound of reading about a group of friends navigating current America, sex, abuse, etc., then this is your book. There are some fairly graphic sex scenes, lots of "Fuck you"s... It's OK. I think there are better contemporary books I get more out of. Last year I read Rooney's newest, Beautiful World, Where Are You and was surprised by how good it is. I'd rather just read that again. I can't decide if this was better than Real Life though, I think it is. Thank you to Random House for the advance copy.
July 13, 2023
This campus novel focuses on a group of friends, following two distinct courses: poetry and dance somewhere in Iowa City. We slowly get to know their relationships, connections, animosities and future plans. Brandon is an extremely skilled writer, this book reads so well and there are moments of sheer genius as in his two previous books. Nonetheless, my biggest problem with this novel is how dispersed it is. A lot of chapters focusing on a particular character seem pretty detached from the other parts of the book. This also made it difficult for me to particularly like any of the characters. The novel seems to be more like loose character sketches that were later somehow stitched together. A bit of disappointment after my two previous encounters with Brandon's prose.
April 16, 2023
(3.5) I love Brandon Taylor’s writing. Unfortunately I didn’t find the characters and situations in this book all that interesting to read about. The parts I most enjoyed – Seamus and his poetry, the beautiful chapter about Bea – also felt the most detached from the main project of the novel. I will still read absolutely anything else Taylor writes because I think his work has a rare psychological acuity and clarity of prose.
I received an advance review copy of The Late Americans from the publisher through Edelweiss.
I received an advance review copy of The Late Americans from the publisher through Edelweiss.
July 25, 2023
3.5
Solid range of character studies within a college town of in Iowa
Solid range of character studies within a college town of in Iowa
January 11, 2026
★★½
this was messy, and not in a good way.
it was very disconnected and jumpy, lacked depth and felt like it didn’t know what it wanted to be. i honestly thought it was a short story collection for the first few chapters because there wasn’t really any threads that let the story flow or feel like it was, well, the same story. none of the characters were interesting and i didn’t connect to any of them. some felt like they were just forgotten, never mentioned again past a certain point and their storyline left on an abrupt ending. i didn’t see the purpose of the book at all, either, unless it just went way over my head. i could see what it was trying to do (i think) and the commentary it was trying to make, but it was so shallow and chaotic (in a bad way) that it couldn’t manage to do, well, anything.
this was messy, and not in a good way.
it was very disconnected and jumpy, lacked depth and felt like it didn’t know what it wanted to be. i honestly thought it was a short story collection for the first few chapters because there wasn’t really any threads that let the story flow or feel like it was, well, the same story. none of the characters were interesting and i didn’t connect to any of them. some felt like they were just forgotten, never mentioned again past a certain point and their storyline left on an abrupt ending. i didn’t see the purpose of the book at all, either, unless it just went way over my head. i could see what it was trying to do (i think) and the commentary it was trying to make, but it was so shallow and chaotic (in a bad way) that it couldn’t manage to do, well, anything.
October 9, 2022
This was hot. This was hot AF.
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Want to read
May 19, 2023New Brandon Taylor Alert! He is an absolute gem and I wish him only happiness and an endless supply of amazing notebooks. Follow him on twitter, you will not be disappointed.
May 25, 2023
i'm pretentious, and i can tell you this is very pretentious. writing was nice, but, gosh, i didn't care about the characters. too many to count and got lost in the story easily.
1.5/5
1.5/5
October 18, 2023
Sometimes I deeply enjoyed this book and other times I found myself confused and bored to tears
January 9, 2025
This one probably would have never made it to the TBR had it not been a recommendation by the library for their . . . .
I love love love the push these challenges offer that get me off my duff to read things I already own or introduce me to new titles/authors. I didn’t bother looking at Goodreads at all until I was finished with this one and went to add to my “Currently Reading” so I wouldn’t forget to rate/review it eventually. And then I saw the rating. Eesh! Unfortunately I can understand it in this case because I think it’s going to be the rare reader who will find themselves able to connect and give it more than a 3.
In theory I should have loved this one. Some of my favorites are what I classify as the true “coming of age” story – those with characters on the cusp of adulthood – navigating romance and verging on the precipice of starting a career/being required to become financially independent. The problem here is this was delivered in the form of a composite novel with a bounty of characters (with super unusual names which made them even harder to keep track of) all offering up little Polaroid sorts of moments without ever really getting to know them/any development/much cohesion whatsoever. The connection is that they are all grad students at the University of Iowa – the reason it fell under the Winter Reading Challenge criteria is most are in an arts program (poetry/dancing). Some characters reappeared, some did not, some (the couple of female chapters) felt like they were thrown in just to check a box. If you are a prude, there’s a lot of sex. Even if you aren’t a prude, the sex all has a toxicity to it that just makes you feel bad for the characters and what they are missing out on.
I would be interested in picking up this author again because I definitely think he can write, but if you are interested in one of these sorts of short story cycle novels, check out Elizabeth Strout. She won the Pulitzer using this style.
I love love love the push these challenges offer that get me off my duff to read things I already own or introduce me to new titles/authors. I didn’t bother looking at Goodreads at all until I was finished with this one and went to add to my “Currently Reading” so I wouldn’t forget to rate/review it eventually. And then I saw the rating. Eesh! Unfortunately I can understand it in this case because I think it’s going to be the rare reader who will find themselves able to connect and give it more than a 3.
In theory I should have loved this one. Some of my favorites are what I classify as the true “coming of age” story – those with characters on the cusp of adulthood – navigating romance and verging on the precipice of starting a career/being required to become financially independent. The problem here is this was delivered in the form of a composite novel with a bounty of characters (with super unusual names which made them even harder to keep track of) all offering up little Polaroid sorts of moments without ever really getting to know them/any development/much cohesion whatsoever. The connection is that they are all grad students at the University of Iowa – the reason it fell under the Winter Reading Challenge criteria is most are in an arts program (poetry/dancing). Some characters reappeared, some did not, some (the couple of female chapters) felt like they were thrown in just to check a box. If you are a prude, there’s a lot of sex. Even if you aren’t a prude, the sex all has a toxicity to it that just makes you feel bad for the characters and what they are missing out on.
I would be interested in picking up this author again because I definitely think he can write, but if you are interested in one of these sorts of short story cycle novels, check out Elizabeth Strout. She won the Pulitzer using this style.
June 4, 2024
I think if you have an interest in MFA programmes and academia you will absolutely enjoy this book. However, it fell really flat for me. We are introdued to many characters and I could barely remember who is who, I kept having to go back and forth trying to piece things together.
Honestly, this book did not work for me at all. It was trying to do and be too much.
Honestly, this book did not work for me at all. It was trying to do and be too much.
August 14, 2025
ces gens font beaucoup l'amour. en même temps, ça n'a pas l'air très animé, autrement, l'Iowa. et puis, qui suis-je pour les juger. du très très bon, du OK, du bien. moi j'avoue quand quelqu'un sait écrire aussi bien que ça je pardonne les creux et les vallées. l'ouverture incroyable, quelques petits morceaux de bravoure. j'en ressors avec la fierté inouïe d'avoir keep track de qui était qui par rapport à qui. justice pour Bea
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