Minor Black Figures

by Brandon Taylor

From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.

As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.

Genres: Fiction, LGBT, Literary Fiction, Queer, Contemporary, Art, Gay

400 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 2025

About the author

There is more than one author with this name

Brandon Taylor is the senior editor of Electric Literature's Recommended Reading and a staff writer at Literary Hub. His writing has received fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kimbilio Fiction, and the Tin House Summer Writer's Workshop. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Iowa, where he was an Iowa Arts Fellow at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in fiction.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

perfection.

every brandon taylor work has been special to me, but this is something spectacular.

https://emmareadstoomuch.substack.com...

from the early pages you can tell this is magic, successful in every way. its setting, a summer-soaked new york, is immersive and atmospheric; its characters, numerous and flawed and lovable to the painful degree that is taylor's signature, are unforgettable; its story is consuming; its dialogue and interiority are brilliant expressions of theme without sacrificing realism or taking the reader out.

this is the great american novel of our generation, both incredibly of our time and somehow timeless. it feels like a balm for the pain and polarization of these particular days, and also the world of friendships and art and success and race that is built here is true of all eras. 

i never wanted it to end and i feel a bit lost without it. i knew adding this to my tbr was like signing up for a depressive episode, but this isn't the type i expected.

this is a masterpiece.

bottom line: a book i will return to again and again. 

(thanks to the publisher for the arc)

[Celine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Minor Black Figures is an era-defining novel. To pick it up is to know, right away, that you’re holding something remarkable.

Over the course of a summer in New York, a Black man named Wyeth explores what it means to be an artist during increasingly political times. Early on, Wyeth meets a man named Keating at a bar, after attending a gallery showing. Every time they meet up, he and Wyeth hold these deliciously fluid conversations about art, religion, personhood — anything, everything. We learn the most about the world the two of them exist in, as well as who they are as individuals, through these conversations.

After unintentionally going viral for what the Internet perceived as being a commentary on the m*rder of George Floyd, Wyeth feels stuck. As his feelings on the matter are challenged, Taylor explores the impossible standards which are placed upon Black artists. To create is to be told that your art is inherently about race, or a commentary about what is happening in the world, politically. Even if that isn’t what the artist (only) set out to do.

Something which stuck out for me while reading is that the writing does not seek to be perfect, or to “age well”. Taylor allows his characters, and this novel, to exist within the world it was created in. The people we are introduced to have ideals, they hold difficult conversations in which they may or may not completely agree on something.

In this way, it pushes up against the digital age, where there is an increasingly panicked attempt to never f*ck up, to judge those who do, to raise the standards of what it means to be a Good Person to impossible heights. And the payoff is huge.

You, as the reader, are given so much to sort through, to hold, to be challenged by.

Minor Black Figures feels like a novel that people will look to, years from now, when asked what it was like to live through 2020s life, Post-Covid. It’s honest, funny, emotional, and queer in a way that shimmers. Beautiful beyond measure.

Which is to say, this is my favorite book that I’ve read all year.

[Justin Tooley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read everything Brandon Taylor puts out because he does such an excellent job capturing the tensions and complexities of Black gay men in their 20s and 30s. I truly enjoy his reflections on the castes of the gay male community. Taylor loves to opine on Black gay men’s idolization and insecurities with White men. I’m here for all of this because it’s provocative. No one does this so intelligently like Taylor. That’s what led me to this book, and will probably lead me to keep on reading his work.

That said, this book is absolutely exhausting. This book is too cerebral and encyclopedic, and it gets in the way of a good story. There’s the making of a good story- struggling artist trying to figure out what he believes, provocative friends, some research into a lost artists, the hyper critical and shallow art world, gay sociology, and a steamy summer love story, with some toxic dating and hookup behaviors like ghosting and leaving people on read instead of using your words. But for me, none of this could really come together to serve up a good dish. Wyeth thinks too much. He’s so insecure; he can’t stop thinking about others perceptions of his work. It paralyzes him. It’s exhausting. It’s not a conflict that invests me.

Taylor is more of a cultural show off in this book rather than a story teller. If you want to write art history, go write that. But I came to hear a story. For almost 400 pages, there’s not a conflict that is worth caring about, and there’s so many jobs and insignificant friends and coworkers that add no value to the story. I didn’t come for pages of art history that is hard to follow and adds no value to the story. It sounds like Brandon Taylor is trying to tell us he’s smart and cultured. It’s exhausting. It makes this book exhausting.

The most interesting plot line is the former priest, Keating, Wyeth’s love interest. But in what reality does Keating put up with Wyeth’s weird and distant tactics? It seems like a fairy tale for cerebral creative types that flounder through their lives landing the masc white man of their dreams.

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brandon Taylor’s intricate, rites-of-passage story opens on a Manhattan summer but written to resemble scenes from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. It’s a strategy signalling Taylor’s intent to produce a “big book” different in flavour from earlier offerings. One that, at least to a certain extent, draws on Taylor’s fascination with Zola, Dickens and Tolstoy. Like Ben Lerner with Transcription, Taylor’s keen to highlight the novel’s specific possibilities as a form, doing things that only a novel can do – distancing himself from the novel as thinly-veiled audition for Netflix. Taylor’s also attempting to conjure an era, a moment - like the one Dickens was addressing – of rupture and profound political change.

Taylor’s plot revolves around struggling queer, Black artist Wyeth – named for Didion’s Maria Wyeth not the real-life American artist. Wyeth feels out of step both with his time and the forces that frame him as first and foremost a Black artist. Originally from Virginia, he studied art in Wisconsin, one of six Black students on his programme. But Wyeth’s arrival coincided with the murder of Tamir Rice by a white police officer, an atrocity that fuelled the other Black students’ imagination, caught up in representing lost Black youth, violence and oppression. Meanwhile outsider Wyeth, roundly criticised as self-indulgent bordering on irrelevant, was reimagining stills from European cinema - notably the films of similarly angst-ridden Ingmar Bergman. The others in line with the zeitgeist went on to achieve success, Wyeth faded into relative obscurity until happenstance enabled a move to New York. Wyeth’s experiences highlight Taylor’s interest in exploring what it might mean - versus what it’s often made to mean - to be a Black artist in contemporary America – and by extension a Black writer, not unlike R. F. Kuang talking about constraints and expectations that flow from her positioning as an Asian American author rather than "simply" an author.

Now the insecure, relentlessly self-questioning Wyeth’s desperate to be relevant on his own terms. But what are they? And how does he contend with the anxiety of influence, and evade the commodification of his identity? Or as it’s phrased here “identity-based art grift” exemplified by fashionable, fictional collective MangoWave. Rather like Gerhard Richter, Wyeth’s engaged in photorealist painting informed by images taken from a protest against the overturning of Roe vs. Wade. A compromise that mingles a traditionalist aesthetics with a bid to deal with “the mess and randomness of life.” But things aren’t working out. Although it seemed naïve for Wyeth’s character to think it possible to be both successful and unresponsive to wider currents within the broader artworld. It’s now that Taylor introduces a low-key variation on a sensationalised, sentimental love story with a storyline that echoes pulp, gay romance fiction. Or Taylor’s version of “what happens when you spend all of a New York summer having sex with a hot Jesuit.” In a sideways homage to the glorious Viola Davis, Taylor’s Jesuit adrift is called Keating like Wyeth he’s undergoing a crisis of faith. But Keating’s more than a rather cliched object of Wyeth’s desire, he opens up a challenge to Wyeth’s ways of seeing the world. Presumably why Taylor makes Keating to the right on issues like abortion? Although, I admit, I found this aspect of Keating’s character, and Wyeth's reaction to it, a bit baffling. Was it a commentary on forging alliances beyond traditional boundaries? A suggested means of overcoming division in a deeply polarised America? Or does it relate to Wyeth’s inner conflict, his need for validation, which results in an inability to assert himself in relation to Keating’s ease borne out of “whiteness?”

The other major strand within the narrative unfolds through Wyeth’s part-time job for an art restorer. One which situates Wyeth within wider histories while enabling a reflection on archival research, and on buried Black artists, near lost to obscurity. It’s a well-researched element that adds an air of mystery to an otherwise slender plot. Another central character here is the city itself, there are some wonderful passages describing the atmosphere of particular neighbourhoods, as well as a spotlight on appalling inequalities and contradictions: impoverished migrants selling fruit on the subway; the unhoused encampment opposite the upmarket gallery where MangoWave later stages an exhibit; the wealthy liberals who’d rather not be confronted with visible, material deprivation on their block.

It’s a difficult novel to assess. I appreciated its ambition. I loved many of the descriptive passages but found the dialogue stilted and stagey. Although there were redeeming flashes of excoriating, wry wit. Taylor’s clearly done his research, I thought his portrayal of the NY artworld was very persuasive. I also thought the questions being posed about the intersection between art, race, identity and politics were more than worthy of attention. But the multiple strands didn’t quite come together for me. Moreover, the narrative felt a bit baggy and saggy in places, a morass of detail frequently threatening to eclipse Taylor’s underlying arguments. I often found Keating less than convincing too. Yet I was more and more caught up in his messy, erotic romance with Wyeth and what that might mean for Wyeth’s likelihood of finding himself – if such a thing is even possible.

Thanks to Netgalley and publisher Jonathan Cape for an ARC

Rating: 3.5

[Louis Muñoz · Rating 2 out of 5]

My second try with this author. For whatever reasons, I’ve not been able to connect with his writing, characters, or plots, all of which fall flat for me. I can sort of understand why others like him, and can appreciate the various representations, so I am willing to recommend his books, both as a reader and as a librarian. For my own part, I can’t see myself trying a third book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

Minor Black Figures is slow-moving and highly observational; even though I thought it was beautiful, it took me a while to read. Pitched as a love story between insecure artist Wyeth and enigmatic ex-priest Keating, it’s actually only partly that: a meandering, wide-ranging and contemplative book about love, and also very much about life in New York City, making art, self-doubt, and the art world’s contradictions.

Taylor excels at writing interiority – so much so that, despite the author’s well-documented disdain for the first-person perspective in fiction, I can’t help but think it would have been a much better fit for this story. It’s fascinating to revisit Taylor’s essay ‘against casting tape fiction’ after reading this book. His argument is about a specific way of using first person, the passive ‘deracinated I’ that fails to account for an individual’s subjectivity. But in the use of third person here we have the opposite problem. The narrative is not written from Wyeth’s perspective, yet is filled with his thoughts and beliefs. Sometimes these are prefaced with ‘Wyeth thought...’, but often they are simply part of the narrative. It’s intensely interior and personal.

In third person, some of the commentary feels awkward, over-explanatory, as though it's designed to be read in some future time when Taylor’s/Wyeth’s reference points, and the attendant social context of the 2020s, will not be immediately legible. At its worst this approach reminded me of what has turned me off recent ‘state-of-the-nation’ novels, where the story is repeatedly interrupted by bland factual accounts of major events that took place within recent memory. I do not need to be told what the pandemic was like, or rehash the arguments for and against face masks. If the novel is still being widely read in years to come, I guess this stuff will be more interesting.

On the other hand, I loved Taylor’s depiction of how Wyeth, as a Black artist, moves through the art world. Because it is about a specific experience rather than general observation, this is one place where commentary really does work. Post-2020, Wyeth finds artists of colour have begun to be rewarded, albeit in a self-conscious, patronising way that leaves artists like him vulnerable to criticism from all sides. Wyeth paints scenes from arthouse films in which he replaces the – invariably white – characters with Black people. These figures are not supposed to be political statements; they’re just people. As he tells another artist, ‘all I’m interested in, really, is the scene itself. But people can’t see past the blackness of it. They want the blackness to mean something, and when it doesn’t, they get confused.’ (It’s impossible not to see the parallels to how Taylor's own work has sometimes been received, in particular some of the criticisms levelled at The Late Americans.)

The dynamic between the women in the film and the women in Wyeth's transposition of the film were, he thought, almost identical in content, but the viewer's relationship to that dynamic was different because the two black women in such a setting had to have some accounting for how they had come to be there. This tension, this disbelief needing suspension, led people to say strange things about Wyeth’s paintings. Sometimes, Wyeth's work was described as bourgeois, betraying a desire for black ease and affluence, trading in a corrosive and politically dubious desire to see black people rich or at the very least in luxurious settings. Sometimes, it was described as fantastical, depicting unrealistic and strange juxtapositions, as though the black people in his paintings had wandered into a genre or set of conditions totally discordant with what the viewer considered their actual reality.

I adored the rest of the art writing, too – the attention to detail in Wyeth’s creative process. I think Taylor is exceptional at bringing to life the small details of day-to-day activity, whether work, study or creative passion. (While I’m biased towards art novels anyway, the long passages about Wallace’s science experiments were some of my favourite parts of Real Life.)

First vs. third person debate aside, Wyeth’s interiority is heartbreakingly true to life, particularly how he ruminates endlessly on desire, attraction and interaction, his painfully self-aware, stubborn nature corroding the intimacy he seeks. He’s written in such an emotionally transparent way. And although the love story was not what attracted me to this novel, the relationship between Wyeth and Keating is a perfect portrait of an overthinking person falling in love with a very open person who appears much more comfortable in the world.

For all its digressions and lack of momentum, Minor Black Figures is deeply felt; for all that the prose is sharp and precise, the real stuff of the story resists clarity or any sort of pat conclusion. Lots to chew on here, and I still don’t feel I’ve finished thinking about it. It didn’t mean as much to me personally as Real Life did, but it’s richer, certainly more mature, arguably more interesting.

PS continue to be baffled by the 5-month difference between the US and UK publication dates for this book. Bizarre for such a high-profile writer.

I received an advance review copy of Minor Black Figures from the publisher through Edelweiss.

[Jenna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Truthfully how am I supposed to write a review about this book? I loved each of BT’s works thus far, and each of them moved me in their own ways, but THIS ONE? It changed me. Profoundly.

I know a lot of people will not get this book, as I know a lot of people didn’t get The Late Americans. BT has a way of rambling on, waxing poetic with details and descriptions. He lingers in a way that few others do, in places that definitely slow the plot to an uncomfortable crawl. But in all his books, and in this one especially, the crawl is the point. The lingering, the pause, the waiting, is what it’s all for. He takes his time, slow like molasses on a hot summer day, and he wants you to take time out of your day to sit with him. As such, this is a relatively dense book. It’s easy enough to read, not so over the top that you can’t follow it if you focus a little, but it is pretentious in its philosophy. It forces you to play along with the game, to wander down the rabbit holes that Brandon himself has surely fallen down. I found myself researching things I never expected, reading about Sargent or Bergman, and the whole experience left me feeling like a door had opened within me. I fell deeply in love with Wyeth and his struggles and his passion - both because I saw myself in him and I saw how deeply different we are - and in many ways, I did feel like I went on a journey with him. He taught me a lot - or, BT taught me a lot - and coming out the other side, I don’t really know how to hold all of that within me.

This is a book that touches on so many important things, and I really do believe it’s The Novel of our time period. Of the 20s. It does things so few authors want to do - tackling things like the post-COVID landscape, the ways so many of us hide behind our ignorance, the question of where art fits in the modern technological world - and it does it in a way that is not only engaging and beautiful, but real. It made me think about a lot of things. It made me want to be a better person and a better artist and a better archivist. It reminded me of who I used to want to be, but gave up on during the pandemic.

And yes, of course, it’s such a quintessentially Black book. I think BT is such a fascinating author because he always writes about the strange intersection of Black and white, whether that’s in relationships or in artistry or in history. Mostly I feel like he poses a lot of questions. He ruminates and runs in circles and offers great points of discussion without really sharing how he feels about anything, as if asking the reader to come to their own conclusions, but you can read between the lines. You can see where his interests lie, where his own questions lead him, and it forces you to reconsider your own place in the world. Sure, this book hits me differently as a white person, and I have to sit with that, but that’s part of it. Sitting with it. Learning a lot, learning that there’s always more to learn. But also allowing myself to feel a connection with this book. With BT, with Wyeth, obviously with Keating.

God, I know it’s cliché to love a white man, but Keating…whew.

It feels like BT put a whole world inside of me, and I don’t know how to get it out. I’m not sure I want it out.

I will be thinking about this for a very long time and I cannot wait to own a paperback copy of this so I can reread it over and over and scribble in it relentlessly. A masterpiece.

[Sahil Javed · Rating 5 out of 5]

oh sad gay books are so back. amen.

[Derek Driggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, it’s happened. I’ve read my favorite book of the year. Which, if you’ve followed my reviews, you know is a big deal—it’s been a good year for reading.

Would I say this was the BEST book of the year? No, probably not. There were things here and there I thought could have been edited; a couple of plot lines felt unnecessary; for a book that ostensibly is not autofiction there were times I saw the author a little too clearly through the protagonist. But the writing was beautiful, the sentiments were unique and timely and touching, the characters were endearing, the messaging was not didactic in the way it made me reflect. Oh, and the romance was hot 👀 which isn’t my go-to in books but the way it showed up here felt so human and anxiety-inducingly-high-stakes.

Brandon Taylor’s former novels have not spoken to me. They felt very MFA, a category I have mixed feelings about. Very Iowa workshop, so like prestigious but also self-indulgent—and also just a little too curated for the literary palate of “today.”

But before this one came out, I came across his substack and some of his critical reviews, and the person I met there was fascinating and funny and cynical and fairly captivating as an intellect. And then he revealed his love for Henry James and Edith Wharton, and I was caught: “Ok, Brandon, I guess I will like you now.”

Then, with the release of the novel, I saw somewhere that he’d described a desire to “return to the form” of the Victorian novel: no more of this sparse, discomfiting for the sole purpose of discomfort, rather than a meaningful subversion, MFA stuff. He said we should have to work when we read. That he was dying to DESCRIBE things again.

What he achieved ended up, for me, being emotionally as close to a return to Victorian novels as is possible while also being THOROUGHLY modern.

Liberal readers like me will be asked to question some things, here, and conservative readers may finally see things with new eyes in ways. And everyone, I think, will have a great time.

[Ari Levine · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. I enjoyed Taylor's affecting debut novel Real Life, and thought his follow-up The Late Americans was underbaked.

This one was an overstuffed narrative of a few months in the intellectual, erotic, artistic, and emotional (in that order) life of a struggling millennial gay Black painter in New York. Taylor vividly reconstructs the micro-level feeling and smells of New York in the dog days of August, and the painstaking work of painting and art restoration. Working two jobs to pay the rent for a tiny fifth-floor walkup, Wyeth has achieved minor fame for painting photo-realistic scenes from Ingmar Bergman films, reinhabited with Black subjects.

Creatively blocked and stuck, he struggles mightily with his viewers' relentless white gaze, seeking to escape from the prevailing art-critical discourse about identity politics (satirized by a trendy collective of entitled South Asian Instagram artists called "MangoWave"), and his viewers' ideological assumptions that he produce work that objectifies the historical trauma of racism. He stumbles into an on-again/off-again relationship with Keating, a hot white ex-Jesuit priest, who stages his own wrestling matches with theology and his lost calling.

Wyeth is not an especially reflective or emotionally self-aware protagonist, and Taylor characterizes him through dialogue. The narrative momentum is continually obstructed by extended essays about art theory and God's absence in the form of dialogue exchanges. Here, all the characters sound the exactly like Taylor, and these unsubtle lectures would work better as Substack posts or five-hour podcast monologues.

Thanks to Riverhead Books and Netgalley for sharing an ARC of this in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was, in its individual parts, filled with imperfection, with rambling screeds, lectures on agency, morality, truth, integrity and God. There were long and somewhat splintered digressions on the nature of art. And I loved it. This was a portrait of a community, a life, a place that was, in an earlier incarnation, my community, my life, and my place. It saved me as it saved the MC Wyeth. In my 20's, when I connected with artists living in NYC (this was the 80s), sleeping in Alphabet City squats with often non-functional plumbing and shared beds, I felt for the first time that I could speak, say what I really meant, and if I got shit back that was fair, and the world would not end. Of course, I was soon living the dual life as a law student where hyper self-consciousness was my reality. It was a weird time. Wyeth's obsession with what others were thinking of him, the paralysis it inspired, felt so real to me, and also gave me new perspectives on others and on myself. His struggles are different because in many ways this Black, queer art-school-trained man who grew up in a trailer in the South is utterly different from me, and his experience in the world differs (the discussion of what makes art or artists Black Art or Black Artists was wonderful), but I felt real kinship and sharp enlightenment throughout.

Thanks go to Derek Driggs, who has become something og my reading soulmate here on GR. After reading Taylor's Real Life, I had decided pretty absolutely that Taylor was not the author for me. Derek urged me to give him another chance, that he thought I would like this, and somehow he knew.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I think sometimes that atheists imagine themselves to be the ultimate believers in free will. But then they go around giving away their agency and power, assigning this deterministic force to all the systems— capitalism, patriarchy, racism, white nationalism. And it's like, you guys do not believe in free will at all."

Fascinating exploration of black bodies and the white gaze. Told through the lens of art, faith, ambition, politics, sex & relationships. Sometimes sensual, sometimes scornful, never easy. Full of questions.

I loved how the narrative begins to mirror several of the references made in the book. It’s unhurried and kinda pastoral in its approach (a lot of day to day moments). If I have one criticism, it’s that the ending is kind of muted. Then again, perhaps that kind of ending fits a novel like this: One that dissects but has no clear answers; one that leaves you in a state of somewhat dissatisfaction; one that lets you know that life’s possibilities are boundless and therefore unknown.

This felt like a more grown-up version of his debut REAL LIFE. It still feels very Brandon Taylor but pivoting more to the spiritual and consciousness. Made for a very hypnotic read.

[Mark Kwesi · Rating 5 out of 5]

“That summer, they threw bombs and made signs for peace.”

This novel is dense in the best way. If you know Brandon Taylor from his essays and online writing, especially his Substack sweater weather, you expect sharp thinking and dry, sometimes cutting humor. All of that – and a lot more – is here in his third novel Minor Black Figures.

Some writers open a book; Taylor detonates one. The first line of Minor Black Figures builds the lens through which I read everything that follows. Then Part II begins with a sentence that runs for more than a page, thick and heavy with atmosphere like the novel itself and vaguely reminiscent of James Baldwin in its emotional weight.

The story follows Wyeth, a young gay Black painter, through a sticky, emotionally loaded summer in post-pandemic New York City. Wyeth has love affairs, most importantly with Keaton, an ex priest, which is exactly as complicated as it sounds. What I love is how Taylor captures the fragile early stages of romantic relationships – the circling, the guessing, the awkwardness, the fear of getting hurt; this is something Taylor already did in his first novel Real Life, one of my all-time favourites, but he pushes it even further here.

Minor Black Figures is also a political novel, but not in the way I expected. The politics unfold in conversations, in art spaces, in Wyeth's thoughts about his craft, and especially in his relationship with Keaton, which challenges some of his own convictions. This is something I liked a lot; it seems to me much harder to write fiction that observes than fiction that argues. Taylor is not an activist on the page; he's a sharp, skeptical witness.

The atmosphere is thick and restless. This is a novel you sit inside. It took me six weeks to finish because it demands attention and emotional stamina. While it's not comfort reading, it's necessary and emotionally fulfilling reading. I already know I will come back to it soon: some books don't end when you close them.

[ancientreader · Rating 5 out of 5]

A risky, not to say rebarbative, opening: first, a rundown of US politics, 2022, with emphasis on the reaction to Dobbs; next, the protagonist, Wyeth, thinking thinking thinking about his stalled attempts at making art. So we’ve got public emotion but not personal feeling, and a character we don’t know yet who’s trapped in abstraction. It’s not easy to engage, and it doesn’t become much easier for a long time: Wyeth lives in a La Brea Tar Pit of self-consciousness and second-guessing. He weighs every thought and action against what he imagines other people’s assessments to be, and since we’re trapped in his perspective, the other characters appear mostly as his constructs -- that is to say, as assemblages of the judgments he believes or fears they’re making. A note I made early on: “This reads like an essay more than a novel.”

My attention snagged, over and over, on Wyeth’s name — an odd authorial choice, you might think, to name a Black artist for Andrew Wyeth, but it turned out to be odd only in the sense that it’s freighted. Wyeth’s mother is white, and also neglectful to the point of being abusive: this would seem a little too on the nose if Taylor harped on it, which he doesn’t. We glimpse just enough of her for the point to be made.

And not that Wyeth’s Black relatives were a whole lot better; what he got from them was mainly disapproval of his mother (fair, but unhelpful) with a big side helping of forced prayer in a dark shed. One way and another, he's gotten a lot of practice in judgment.

There are things to be said about Wyeth’s two part-time jobs, one as an assistant in the art-restoration workship of a rich man, the other in an art gallery, and about his relationships with his co-workers and with the artists with whom he shares studio space. There’s also Keating, a lapsed Jesuit priest who after many fits and starts (these are mainly on Wyeth’s side) becomes Wyeth’s lover.

This review would spool out for a dozen single-spaced pages if I analyzed all those in detail, so I’ll leave it at saying that Wyeth’s is struggling on two (or more) intimately intertwined fronts, both to do with forms of self-consciousness. He can’t connect with other people spontaneously and directly; and he has no idea how to make art as a Black person enmeshed in the general whiteness of art history, where even the work of Black artists finds itself responding to whiteness, conscious of white gazes, whether acceding to those gazes or revolting against them — or or or. For a metaphor here I’ll switch from La Brea to the Ouroboros.

Wyeth’s relationship with Keating is transformative. Not because Keating has great wisdom to offer — a priest who’s lost his connection to the divine is not unlike an artist who can’t find his way back to making art — but (as I read it) because he’s emotionally present and visibly suffering, because the dark shed in which Wyeth was forced to pray has meaning for Keating as a metaphor for faith, because these things combine with Keating’s physical beauty and his whiteness to make him desirable emotionally, sexually, as a model. (For the avoidance of doubt, I promise that this novel is alert to the difficulties of Wyeth's relationship to Keating's whiteness.)

In saying all this I feel as if I’m oversimplifying or missing something — missing a great deal, probably, because I’m not only outside Wyeth’s experience of racial politics (outside the experience of any person of color, what with being white myself, and all) but also unfamiliar with many of the artists and thinkers who for better and worse mean so much to him. Minor Black Figures is a very thinky novel, but then the more I was drawn into Wyeth’s emotional world and his thought world, the more often I wanted to shake him and tell him, loudly, just to speak from his heart for once. Eventually, he does. Eventually, he makes art. Eventually, the irony and distancing in all his relationships, with friends and co-workers as well as with Keating, give way to something that feels risky, genuine, vulnerable.

Not an easy protagonist to spend time with, not an easy book to enjoy, but I found my impatience/patience rewarded. Thanks to Riverhead Books and NetGalley for the ARC.

ETA: A much smarter person than I, with much more expertise, has a very different and much more critical take, here.

[Jessica Woodbury · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. It took me about a month to read this book, it's a very slow-moving story. But it never left my mind and I'm still thinking about it weeks later. I think Taylor is doing some very interesting things here, but it does require the reader to slow down and take it in much like you would with one of the foreign films Wyeth watches and recreates.

This is the first time I think Taylor has really considered art and artists in his novels. (The Late Americans certainly had plenty of artists in it, and yet I didn't find that it had much to say about making art at all.) And this is what kept me coming back to this book, was the way Taylor considers--sometimes with real sharpness and sometimes with slow consideration--art as seen by a viewer, as dreamt and made by the artist, as statement of politics or meaning or neither. I like books about art but many don't do a very good job of bringing the art to life to the reader, but I felt like this was what Taylor did best in this novel. The works of art sometimes feel more alive than the characters. You can imagine them. And as we sit with Wyeth, who was briefly celebrated during the Black Lives Matter movement and now has to figure out what to do next, the questions of art and what it means and what it means differently when your art is connected to your racial identity, the novel comes to life and asks big, real questions.

I cared less about Wyeth's relationship with a former Jesuit priest, which takes up most of the page count and was where I often found myself slowing down and losing momentum. (The priest's name is Keating, yes Taylor still names characters like this.) Ultimately it did take us somewhere and I was glad it did. But I found myself much more interested in the scenes of solving an artistic mystery.

I still don't quite know what to make of Taylor's novels. I had a lot of problems with The Late Americans and most of them are not problems here, thankfully.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

gay yearning but in the artistic sense

[Medusa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short take : I didn’t like this book but there are some interesting observations and at times excellent writing. But it’s digressive, solipsistic, navel gazey, and superficial, either insincere or failing a Turing test for sincerity, in spite of aspirations for depth and meaning. Oh we are young and beautiful and know everything and we are just SO interesting, dahlink. The plot is an afterthought at best. plenty of people have loved this and will love it; but I’m not one of them and highly doubt I’ll read anything else of his.

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

brandon taylor's writing 🤌🏻

[esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

everyone wake up cus literary realism is soooo back!

i can hear some snoring already, which i know means that not everyone wants to read about a character going step by step through the coffee-making process, or about every single person/thing/event he happens to see on a walk. i think if this book wasn’t so specific to our time—both in its referentiality and its wide gestures towards the great crises of the current decade (representation in a world of hypermediation and hypervisibility, identity politics in the art world, faiths both sweeping and tiny and, conversely, faithlessness, picking up the pieces of a post-pandemic world (STAY WITH ME here because i know some people flee at the slightest inkling of temporal specificity and particularly in the form of referencing covid))—such detailed descriptions of the mundanities that crowd around these crises would not be as bearable. so much of the realist novel has been outmoded in contemporary fiction, which loves its fragments and obscurities and listlessnesses and poetics, that it does feel genuinely good to spend a few paragraphs making coffee in between heated discussions on subjectivity as translated through visual art.

and all of this is great already, but oh man, does taylor know how to write dialogue. here i specifically am thinking of writing dialogue that sometimes does not entirely make sense, because it’s not explaining something to the reader in the trite movie-script way, but rather depicting characters conveying themselves through the limitations of spoken communication. and indicating that sometimes the connecting link actually lies outside the words coming out of someone’s mouth. and showing that maybe there is no connecting link at all and the failure to communicate stoppers all exchange. and including the awkward isms and repetitivenesses and courtesies of daily speech. mm scrumptious.

because mediation is such a focal point of the novel, taylor’s prose is also profuse with references to all kinds of media—european films, classical music, and, of course, painters. i can only recall knowing one of these (rachmaninoff), which means there was probably a great deal of context i was missing, and also that i’m sure the novel will probably get accused of pretentiousness, because social media was only mentioned, like, once in comparison to its litany of (to me) mostly opaque references. for me i just kind of wish i knew fully what was going on, because having it explained is never as satisfying as knowing off the bat. so maybe i’m not pretentious enough, then (/s).

anyway, i think the characters themselves do lay out quite clearly what the novel is about, and in fact sometimes literally end up doing what the narrator is pontificating about, so there’s not only a kind of referential but also self-referential quality to taylor’s realism—representation as a closed circuit, almost? i feel as though this is partly what makes the feel book so distinctly contemporary, aside, obviously, from its content and ultramodern lexicon. it builds a world that talks about mediation through mediation of the world itself, moving through a quite anxious and existential type of storytelling that feels very current. but does this make the novel’s representational project more transparent than its plot and characters? idk. i sort of wanted to know more about wyeth and keating and all of the novel’s secondary characters. or maybe i’ve seen too much press content about what the book is trying to do. ultimately i cannot be the arbiter of its success, but i did very much enjoy the read.

[Sebastian · Rating 4 out of 5]

​I initially rated this novel between three and four stars but ultimately chose four stars due to the important topics it addresses. The story centers on Wyeth, a painter struggling to find his footing both artistically and in his daily life. The book features some truly excellent passages on the COVID-19 crisis, racial identity, audience expectations for art, and the social system's inherent lack of fairness. While I enjoyed the slow pace and its sometimes stream-of-consciousness style, I occasionally felt a lack of clear direction amid the many events of Wyeth's life.

[Steven · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt so little reading this; the observations felt so passively, paltrily obvious, parroting relentlessly agreeable politics; the writing borders on gorgeous but opts for long drawn-out and repetitive sentences about what Wyeth sees; Taylor's character journeys are so slight that I feel as though instead of a journey from A - Z, we experience a journey from lowercase a to Capital A.

Is the role of art to ask questions or to provoke them? If the answer is the former, then boy does Minor Black Figures ask them; so relentlessly inquisitive is this novel that it leaves zero room for the reader themselves to wonder. Every question posed by the art that Wyeth ponders -- paintings books movies photos sculpture -- is spoonfed to us, the reader, like a precocious art school kid. A very defensive, indecisive art school kid. Who think way more about painting than actually doing it over the course of this novel but that's the point I guess.

The dialogue here is ... well, it happens. Taylor, IRL, loves tennis. You can feel the conversation topics volleying back and forth between interlocutors, but none of them talk like regular human beings; or rather, they speak like theory mouthpieces. I don't like when it feels like the author is just putting two of their own opposing viewpoints into characters and then, upon deploying them in conversation, expects us to
1. care
2. think it's particularly good.

The most affecting scenes felt like they were just slightly elevated romance smut. Keating is Wyeth's love interest, and it's at least refreshing that Taylor is going with a happier-spin on gay relationships here (of course each is due their own requisite fucked-up-ness). The most interesting thing about Keating is his prior occupation. The most interesting thing about Wyeth and Keating together is that they talk about God a bit. Again: nothing to write home about, and this is Taylor's longest novel by a considerable measure.

When I read something I want to feel roped in; I want to feel something; I want to care; unfortunately, Minor Black Figures can't "figure" out what it wants to be: it's romance, it's a novel of observations, it's a collection of essayistic digressions, it's an angsty treatise on art/God/queerness/race/COVID; the messiness is the point, but the reason why Real Life works (though at this point, I'm not sure it would hold up on a reread, and I'm wondering if that was a fluke) is because of its tight focus, almost unbearable focus, that opens up into a somber, uncertain conclusion. Minor Black Figures is finely written, but: nothing novel in this novel.

[Randy Cox · Rating 2 out of 5]

As I was reading Minor Black Figures, the expression “writing about music is like dancing about architecture” went through my head a number of times. Perhaps “writing about painting” could be slotted in and hold up, too. There are also several instances in which characters watch movies, listen to music, and read books, which leads to extended passages attempting to summarize the impact of observing these real life pieces, but mostly come off as thin cliff notes that stripped away the charm of the originals. There’s also a plot about the fragility of new, uncertain love, but it also meanders frustratingly through paragraphs full of angst-ridden art chatter.

[Luke O'Neill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ah, I forgot what it's like to read a Brandon Taylor novel. To quickly fall into a world and become wrapped up in its characters and their chronic overthinking. To marvel at the prose while occasionally getting frustrated at having to decide whether to look up the niche references (this one has a lot) or plod ahead.

With Real Life, I remember noticing and feeling a sense of darkness - not just tension but almost dread (not a bad thing). Minor Black Figures feels much more open and, not necessarily 'light,' but filled with opportunities or potential outcomes instead of the sort of locked-in feeling of Real Life. The art restoration theme maybe plays a role in this.

The way Brandon Taylor can write about the minutia of art restoration (the pigments and brushes and dirt and dust) in a compelling and interesting way was one of the most surprising and enjoyable elements of the book. The art restoration ties neatly in to how the book discusses themes of identity and how Wyeth navigates relationships, landing in the end on trying not to steer a relationship but rather being open to what comes.

There were some bumps in the road for me. It's heavily referential, which is interesting but also felt at times inaccessible, or like the meaning was just out of reach. There are also some moments at the end where the decisions and behaviors of the characters felt a touch unrealistic. Like it was almost an overcorrection to the darkness I noticed in Real Life. Still really enjoyed it though.

[Violet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't blown away by The Late Americans, but I adored Minor Black Figures. We follow Wyeth for a whole summer a couple of years after Covid, as he tries to build his life as a Black artist in New York. There's a lot about being a Black artist, Black identity and finding oneself, and I loved the detail of each paragraph, how Brandon Taylor really takes you inside his character's head as he creates art, works, dates. It feels so contemporary, really captures I think that space between 2020 and 2024, which at times feels so long ago. I really loved it.

Free copy sent by Netgalley.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book on the role of race and expression in art, coming of age, and being black and gay in America today.
Main character Wyeth is a black, gay 31 yr old painter living in New York. He is not very likeable or interesting. He seems to overthink everything which became quite annoying.
The part of the story I was most committed to was the romantic relationship between Wyeth and Keating, an ex-Jesuit priest. It was captivating to see their progress over time.

[Ashley Shea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can be mad about how long it took me to read a book while also praising said book for being an absolute freaking masterpiece.

Brandon Taylor finally fully did it for me. There have been inklings in every single one of his books that have made me think to myself "so close, keep trying." And every time he writes a book, I tell myself I must read it to see if it finally clicks for me. And finally... FINALLY... this is the one. The perfect juxtaposition of character, setting, subject, dialogue, set-up, conflict, climax, resolution, STORY. THIS is how you write a book!

I'm not any sort of expert on books or what makes a book amazing or what makes a book not amazing. I am confident there are so many more qualified people out there that can tell me all the reasons some other of his books are also amazing (or more amazing than this one). I'm just a consumer. I am an ink drinker, an eater of books. I have consumed all of Taylor's books and so many of them have been filling and interesting but in some way bitter or had a bad aftertaste or too many warring flavors. This one was the most cohesive, the most wholesome, the most flavorful, the TASTIEST!!

But moving away from food metaphors, this one felt so mature to me, so well-defined and sure of itself. There was such clear character development, a clear and relatable time and place. There was an MC who - like so many of Taylor's characters - spent so much time in his own head as could have been exhausting. But he surrounded him with characters who understood him and drew him out of himself. And so many varied characters that helped in unique ways. You could see so clearly a portrait of a life that you could even see yourself living. Every time I opened this book I fell right into it! I hoped for a positive ending, honestly, comparing to Real Life, I just hoped the MC was moving forward by the end and not standing still. I hoped the character contained his deep thoughts about race and sexuality but didn't let any of his thoughts hold him back. I hoped he had a safe space to articulate. This book was FULL of safe spaces.

I'm also not any sort of literature major and I always hated when it was time to discuss theme in English class. But just for the sake of trying to convey what, beyond just my flowing praise, was so well done here, I will attempt to say some concrete things. This master work of literary fiction had deep discussions about class, race, art, and just what comes along with people being human, good and bad. I just reread the book description and it's all there. This one delivers on the promises in the description. You have distinct characters and settings, all nestled in the backdrop of New York City as the pandemic is loosening its grip. The main character, Wyeth, has deep conversations and/or deep observations with good friends, past and present lovers, passing acquaintances, work friends, and complete strangers. They talk about heavy topics such as the pandemic, art, selling out, racism, classism, religion, but there is also lightness, humor, tenderness. None of it is boring or unnecessary, even if it's very intense and requires a lot of thought and concentration to get through.

My favorite thing, by far, is how sometimes it took him full pages to get to a point. It would start out infuriating, like "what are you trying to say and how is it taking you so long to say it?!" and then 10 pages later, you were left gobsmacked at how well a point was made. For example, one of Wyeth's colleagues referred to some topic vaguely as being "maddening" or something like that and Wyeth asked her to explain and then they talked for 5 pages (great conversation!) and then at the end of it Wyeth says something like "what I resent most is having to think about it at all." and then the colleague said "like I said, maddening." and I was just floored! The whole book is like this, which means it requires you to sit and think and turn off all distractions and give it the attention it deserves. Not many of us have this luxury (or you can just take 2 months to read it!) but do try, please.

Similarly, the main love story does not overtake any other part of the story, but what I loved about it so so much was the tenderness with which Keating gave Wyeth his full attention, wasn't afraid to challenge him or give his own opinion, but was never cruel, and even loving in how he teased Wyeth for thinking too much, how endearing it was. They understood each other but they also both had this sense of mystery around them and each of them were attracted to the other's mystery. I'm not describing this well. I told myself to leave the love story part alone. It's so hard to describe, how well I thought this part of the story was done. At the end of the day, the whole book, it's hard to describe why I loved it so much, and I've said the same thing about every other single book that ends up being a forever-favorite. This one is going on that shelf, for sure!

I've done what I so often do when writing a review for a book I absolutely adored, which is that I flared hard and hot and fast and now I am spent. I don't think I have any other unique things to say... So instead of just reiterating until I'm blue in the face, I just loved this so much! Thank you, Brandon Taylor!!

[Kaleigh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love this book because Brandon Taylor seems to be thinking about the same thing I’m always thinking about—namely, Bergman movies and priests and the post-pandemic world. There’s really no better way to make sense of the world than through a constant struggle of faith (in everything). Adore a contemporary litfic that’s actually about a person with thoughts and values trying to make sense of things/himself.

It did get a little long and I think there are too many details, details that aren’t helpful or funny or interesting (for example, he’s at the park and describes all of the things people are doing at the park, or gives space to describe why he doesn’t care if his friends order Italian food or dumplings for dinner, please I do not care). BUT still one of the top books of 2025 for me.

I’m so grateful for NetGalley and Riverhead for allowing me to read it early, although I lapsed and I ended up having to finish it via audiobook, which is narrated wonderfully.

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exciting read. Minor Black Figures has many of the elements I look for in a book. I just wanted to savor it. Original and thought provoking, especially if you are an art conservator or involved in the arts in some other way. The scene at the art supply store, finding the right notebook, the comparison of different types of pencils will resonate with like minded people. So yummy.

Among the themes in the story are insecurities and self-perception versus how others interpret us. The story is told from Wyeth's perspective in the third person. There are several sex scenes. Some of them could have been deleted. I skimmed them for Wyeth's thoughts in an intimate setting and what they revealed about him.

The one other edit I would do: delete every version of bored (boring and boredom). There are other words that better address that feeling and it is so prevalent in this book and society, it's become lazy.

Some will find this read foreign and outside their scope of appreciation. No book is for everyone.

"That was one of the more insidious aspects of racism, and white supremacy broadly, the way it could give you a tiny white man in your mind to argue with constantly all the way up and down until you died never having a single thought that was not either about whiteness or a reaction to whiteness, and that it could make even the undulations of your own subjectivity something to suspect and interrogate." (p. 420 in the large print edition.)

[gus gus · Rating 3 out of 5]

⭐⭐⭐ a ½. musím se zamyslet, zda mi to přímé kárání až kázání jednoduše vadilo, nebo to bylo spíše kvůli tomu, že se dotýkalo těch správných schovaných míst. svěží uvažování o političnosti samotné i v umění, tak potřebné pro člověka, na nějž neustále útočí diskurzy formované na tiktoku a sám ani neví, co si má (= co si může) ve své pozici myslet. plné výtvarného umění, filmu a hudby (hudby méně jako u hollerana). nejsilnější v popisu atmosféry, dotyků, spletitosti vztahů a lidské komplikovanosti. vzpomínám si na greenwella a jeho básníka, který většinu svého života prožil ve své hlavě a až zdravotní komplikace jej přivedly zpět k tělu. toto je studie člověka nahlížejího na sebe a vlastně na vše „očima světa”, člověka, který je tak moc ve své hlavě, jež mu ani nepatří.

[Neil Fitzgerald · Rating 2 out of 5]

Definitely far from the worst book I've read this year, but the most disappointing compared to expectations. I've really enjoyed Brandon Taylor's Substack for a couple years, and I got one of my book clubs to read The Late Americans, which I ultimately thought was uneven but with some awesome sections. Minor Black Figures is a letdown for me.

This is a very programmatic book, not necessarily a bad thing. The protagonist, Wyeth, resents being drawn into the referential spiral of the New York art world. He hates the scene-y and cynical networking, he struggles to have honest relationships with other people, and he is specifically anxious about his role as a black artist vis-a-vis the white gaze. I read Wyeth as a pretty straightforward stand-in for the author -- he uses Taylor coinages like "atheist money theology," he shares Taylor's love of Sargent, he thinks Sally Rooney is actually alright, etc.

Reading the book straightforwardly, it's the story of Wyeth's battle against the referential spiral, where his counterweights are (1) paying attention to the everyday and ordinary, including mundane suffering, and (2) the transformative power of romantic love. Like I said, the book is very explicit about its mission, but that's fine -- I can get on board with this theory of the novel. This sounds like an Iris Murdoch novel, and I like Iris Murdoch.

My first problem is that a lot of the description in the book sounds like this:

Guys in the carts made large plates of rice and braised meat. They offered white sauce and hot sauce. They threw more meat on the grill and listened to it hiss while they used their other hand to put more cans of soda and bottles of water into the ice baths. During moments of rest, the men leaned with ropey, tan arms against the counter and gazed out over the street at the people spilling by, noting the lingering glances from those too shy to approach, knowing that they’d be seeing that person again. The men, and it was invariably men in the carts, wore thin T-shirts, blue or white or sometimes black. They had modest paunches and narrow shoulders.

I just don't like this at all. It reads like someone trying to describe halal carts to an alien. This is all very realistic and realistically observed, the kind of indifferent observation that James Wood thinks is essential to the novel, but I personally hate it. When I read a passage like this, I don't see the world around the characters, I see the author standing on the corner with a notepad.

Then, at other times, the narration is not specific enough. Near the end of the book, two characters go to a bar in Chinatown that plays Korean jazz and specializes in unique gins. Wyeth doesn't know anything about Korean jazz or gin, so we can't really learn anything about this bar except that it's kind of pretentious and expensive. As far as I can tell, this specific bar doesn't exist in real life, and it makes me wonder whether some real-life bar (a Japanese listening/whiskey bar?) got Mad-Libs'd into this one. If the point were to make fun of the interchangeability of hip NYC bars, I'd be okay with this, but I don't know if that's what he's doing either -- the detail just feels half-there.

The dialogue is very very snappy. Characters can't go five lines into a conversation without someone planting their foot on someone else's toes. No doubt this is partly a function of our hero Wyeth, who is a hedgehog, but something like half of the interactions in this book nearly immediately devolve into tense sniping. Maybe this is really how some people experience the world, but geez, it feels excessive. It's a shame, because when Wyeth does actually get to talk at length, like with Chloe in the final stretch, I'm really interested and invested in what the characters are saying, and I start to learn about who they are. I guess this mirrors Wyeth's experience, where he misses a lot about the people around him because he shuts down so quickly, but it's frustrating as a reader to get such a small window into the other characters.

The thematic material could be interesting; the double-bind that Wyeth finds himself in as a black artist is potentially interesting. But in this book as it exists, the execution issues were so pervasive that I didn't have much material to engage with the themes at a deeper level.

I hate to be such a downer. I'd love to have my mind changed on this book, but after a first read, I find it pretty hard to recommend.