Minor Black Figures

by Brandon Taylor

Over a hot summer in New York a painter falls for a priest, in this captivating modern love story from the Booker-Prize shortlisted Brandon Taylor

‘One of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation’ Guardian

'A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art' Kirkus
Wyeth is a newcomer to New York, a young Black painter who is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. He shares a studio with his friends and earns money working for a gallery and an art restorer but he’s struggling with his portrait painting, unable to truly capture the life of his subjects.

Then he meets Keating, a white former priest struggling with his faith. The two men seemingly have nothing in common, and yet Keating shows Wyeth how to see the world anew. The hot summer progresses, filled with art openings, walks around the city, and Wyeth’s search for a long-forgotten Black artist. But as the men grow closer, the differences between them become more stark, until Wyeth and Keating must decide what they are willing to risk – for art and for love.
A page-turning New York novel and a sweeping modern romance, Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of loneliness and connection.
'Brandon Taylor is without a doubt our laureate of hyper-intelligent yearning - nobody does it better' Lit Hub

Praise for Brandon

‘Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment’ Emma Cline

'A writer of rare daring, his fiction a series of revelations' Katie Kitamura

'‘The moment-to-moment pleasures of Taylor's prose are such that you simultaneously cannot wait to see where he takes you next while being happy for him to take you anywhere’ Colin Barrett

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

388 pages, Kindle Edition

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.

(review to come)

---------------------
tbr review

adding this to my tbr is like signing up for a depressive episode. and i can't wait

(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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Sahil Javed]

oh sad gay books are so back. amen.

[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.

[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.

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv)]

gay yearning but in the artistic sense

[jocelyn • coolgalreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

brandon taylor's writing 🤌🏻

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Mark Kwesi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to follow

[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.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

We should probably still...think about the world though? Even if it's ending?

Many are the times I've dived into a recent publication on the strength of little knowledge and even less context and been sorely disappointed for my pains. Taylor's one who cropped up in one praised yet contested form or another, and seeing how pathetic it would be to have the queer Black in my reading be represented by Baldwin and few others, I decided the summary was just my breed of enculturated restraint with the slightest promise of an excruciating Künstlerroman good time. Note, however, that I capitalize the B in Black, where Wyeth our narrator does not. It may have something to do with attention paid and priorities set, where you've either lived abandonment and violence at the hands of whiteness or picked up a sense of obligation from those despised by your forcibly estranged parents.

"You're going to paint the hot guy you fucked? God, how typically faggot of you. Are you going to do it with all those gross multistriated colors?"
"I'm insulted in ways I didn't even realize I was capable of feeling insulted,"

Ruminations on Christianity, art, research, obscurity, windfall, the gaze, the cope, the money for eating and the pride for surviving. Sexual endorphins certainly catalyze the burgeoning self-awareness beyond whatever the 'cringe' means these days, and I take it that our beleaguered post-seminarian is not of the school of Christianity that considers life a trial to be meekly resisted so as to better inherit the heavens, else the self-turmoil would've been far more pathetic than poignant. But the truth is the matter is what egged me on in reading this twice as quickly as I would've normally, dipping into it full daily instead of alternating as is my insurance policy. It admittedly has something to do with how rarely I treat with hypermodern literary fiction, so the first semi decent works blows me over. But there is also the love letter to archiving, which was a balm for my ego while my brain wrestled with the juxtaposition of 'pro-life' and 'Good Samaritan'. Or, to see, and be seen in turn.

What he knew was that some people did go back to nurse their parents. To be with them in difficult moments, hold their hands. No one had ever held Wyeth's hand. No one had ever comforted him. So he knew only in the broad sense, having seen it on TV and sometimes heard about it from friends. But in his own life, the idea of going to be by his mother during a difficult time was as alien as breathing underwater.

What he realized—what many were realizing in that moment—was that to ignore the religious element of society was to participate in a delusion as dangerous as the people who wanted to ban drag queens and send queers to conversion therapy.

The country's still in dire need of a collapse of racialized capitalism, if only to solve the slow but sure bleaching of color as one climbs the echelons. But until then, I ponder the grip art manages to maintain in the face of all odds, convincing young and old to tenderly coax through physical effort and cognitive turmoil some conjured display, knowledge, even wonder. And then comes the whole faith thing: faith, and ardor. To see, and be seen in turn, in the midst of the algorithmic panopticon. It makes one praise the laying of bricks and cheer the applying of watercolors when it comes to the business of saving one's soul, I can tell you that much.

The art was secondary—only a fool would come to see it, but Wyeth was a fool if nothing else.

[Elizabeth Tuttle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that is about everything - aesthetics, what defines Black art, religion, navigating difference in relationships, bearing witness to social change, identity politics, and how we treat others.

Wyeth himself is often a frustrating character. He frequently requires those around him to match his mood and tone without communicating it, but is also highly reflective and uses his conversations with friends to reframe how he behaved in previous interactions. Both his flaws and the depth of interiority felt quite realistic. Even early on, I found myself deeply invested in his choices and feelings.

Uncharacteristically, this took me almost a month to read. That's a compliment to the book, as each chapter is so rich with description and thought-provoking dialogue that I found myself taking many reflective breaks.

I'm not sure I know enough about art to appreciate this book to the fullest extent, but in any case if you enjoy thinking about humanity and social relations just read the damn thing.

[vi_reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I know there's still 3 months left in the year, but I'm calling it now: my favorite book of 2025 is Minor Black Figures.

MBF follows Wyeth, a queer artist (at 30-years-young) who has recently moved to NYC, over summer '22. As Wyeth navigates the city, he also struggles to overcome his massive creator's block. Nothing inspires him, and his recent stint in art school + brief encounter with viral fame has him questioning what it means to create art as a black person. Does anything he paint automatically contribute to the conversation of being black? Is it so wrong of him to recreate scenes from obscure French films, featuring black people in knitwear overlooking fjords? What does it all *mean* given the recency of George Floyd's murder?

Through these months, Wyeth is in conversation with other young, POC creatives who seem like they have direction. A particularly satirical interaction comes in the form of MangoWave, a group of 5 upper-middle class South(east) Asian artists focused on painting mangoes "since it possessed all this colonial energy and cultural baggage." Wyeth initially derides their work for being overly earnest and somewhat exploitative. But they have him thinking--is the art good? Is there a way to definitively, objectively measure the quality of these works without taking into consideration (broadly gestures) everything else? Was he just being...a hater? (Aren't we all.)

The conversations about art are already sharp and fascinating. But Wyeth starts seeing Keating, a white ex-Jesuit priest, so now we're also playing with questions about faith and belief. What are the consequences when liberalism deliberately ignores the pervasive religious elements of our society? Are we truly becoming more secular, or has atheist money theology become our new faith system?

I read MBF at just the right time in my life. It's an incredibly contemporary piece of lit, working hard to break down the questions I've been thinking myself, especially as a creative constantly reckoning with my proximity to whiteness. And Brandon is SO adept at capturing the hyperintellectualization that plagues the current generation of youth. It's a wonder any of us are able to wake up every day and function "normally" while our brains can't shut up about people dying from preventable causes left and right and making art is hard when the world feels doomed. There are also more questions than there are answers. Alas, such is life.

But before this review makes MBF seem too bleak, especially for those hesitant to read about the "now," let me tell you that the book was both a mirror for self-reflection and also a guide that encouraged me to be curious and loving and helped me make sense of the world. We meet Wyeth at his most cynical in the early summer months, but as he grows and opens up to love in all forms, he begins to look at the world in a different, more empathetic light. I can only hope we'll all do the same in these times to come.

Other things I loved about the book: reading it feels like I'm *in* Manhattan, being in Wyeth's head (he's an overthinker like me!), the BANGER lines, how funny and melancholic it is.

* * * * * * * * * *

original review: dear god I am obsessed with this book!!! it contains just the right amount of humor and melancholy. and it helped me realize that we're simply all going through an existential crisis (or two) :D

i am going to hand this book out personally to all my friends. wow, talk about a book that couldn't have come to me at a better time in my life.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I believe I've rated all of Brandon Taylor's novels five stars on the quality of the writing, but this is the first one that really moved me--the first one I found myself rereading passages and sitting in quiet contemplation, letting Taylor's words absorb and affect me.

I glanced at some others' reviews before sitting down to write mine, and I saw a few that said they'd tried to read his novels before but just couldn't get into them. This one began slowly for me, then blossomed. I found that I couldn't put it down, and not in a suspenseful, page-turning sort of way. This is a book that expands your mind, getting you to think about the nature of art, gaze, inspiration, and connection.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit long and isn't a page turner, so it won't be for everyone, but it covers interesting topics such as the pandemic, identity politics, representation, and faith with nuance and insight. It's sort of meta and self-referential in a way and parallels the mundanity and slowness of the films discussed. It also has great descriptions of NYC, specifically in the summertime.

I wasn't familiar with all of the art, film, and music references but that didn't take away from my experience. It could've easily crossed into pretentious territory with this writing style and the art references but I didn't find that to be the case. It also had gay yearning without being fully sad and bleak. Overall I really enjoyed reading this slowly and it had a weird crossover with the phase of my life I thought I wanted to be an art restorer and the current phase of my life where I want to be an archivist!

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review! This was my first Brandon Taylor and I'll be checking out more of his books.

[Ben Dutton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brandon Taylor's latest novel, Minor Black Figures, is a masterpiece. It enchanted me, thrilled me and moved me from it's opening sentence and didn't let me go. This is likely to remain the best book I've read this year.

Now with the hyperbole out of the way, let me tell you about Wyeth, the central character year, a black artist living in contemporary New York. Then he meets Keating, a former white Jesuit preacher, and the two of them begin to date, and both men find their worlds upended in different ways. Wyeth's journey is the core of this novel, and it was a pleasure to walk this path with him.

Taylor writes with a beautiful restraint, his language rich and intoxicating. He lets his characters breathe on the page, let's their discourses on various subject - art, politics, women's rights - flow naturally, and I found myself caught up in this world. Absolutely fabulous stuff. I can't wait to read it again.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

[Paola · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is a layered exploration of art, love, identity, and the realities of living and surviving in New York City. What stayed with me most was the emotional depth of the Wyeths’ and Keating's relationship, which is raw, quietly tender, and beautifully human. Keating is vividly portrayed, from the tactile detail of his working hands to the reflection of his blond hair.

There's a quiet, intimate power in how we first meet Keating, yearning for a cigarette, and how that small, unspoken ritual carries through to their final moment together. It’s in those sidelong glances and the silence between drags that their deepest conversations happen. The novel closes by affirming that “choosing happiness isn’t selfish,” and it’s through these tender, unguarded moments, where they don’t even make eye contact, that their connection feels most honest and profound.

Personally, there were some bumps for me. At times, the prose wandered into long, observational tangents that, while rich in detail, occasionally lost momentum. The mix of plot threads: narrative of art restoration, Dell Woods, COVID-19, social commentaries, and relationships (random hookup that came out of nowhere) sometimes made it hard to grasp the story's direction. Still, the novel offered valuable insight, particularly in how it framed representation in art, specifically Black art, and explored themes of religion and cult-like communities. It made me think about who gets represented, who tells the stories, and at what cost.

I would still recommend this novel; it's a layered exploration of art, and love. I absolutely loved Real Life and I look forward to continuing to support their work.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the Arc! 🎨

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF at 50%. The art is not good and it isn’t interesting!

[Kurt Neumaier · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book pairs very nicely with the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice.

"Agency exists," he said.
"Yes, and I am using my agency to do something I feel ambivalent about. How very modern."

[Ryan Brandenburg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve read all of Brandon Taylor’s books, so I was thrilled to receive an ARC of this one. I thoroughly enjoyed “Real Life” when I read it, which led me to read all of Brandon Taylor’s books since then.

Unfortunately, there’s been a significant downslide in my ratings of all of his books since then. And this one is now my least favorite.

Taylor’s books are never plot driven, but this one really wandered off track for me—to the point that I almost considered stopping it. Wyeth, similar to many of Taylor’s main characters in his novels, became even more and more irksome as time went on. While I found the sections about his (friendship and romantic) relationships very intriguing and interested, they were buried in overly drawn out sections about the intricacies of the art world, which didn't interest me.

I’ll be more selective with his future novels and let others read them first. Given the length of 400 pages, I’m not sure this one is worth the time and effort.