I don't want to talk about it: On Brandon Taylor’s “The Late Americans”
Brandon Taylor | The Late Americans | Riverhead Books | May 2023 | 320 Pages
When Seamus, a young poet in The Late Americans, reflects on the painful parts of his childhood, he thinks to himself that they were “of such a common source that it embarrassed him.” In Brandon Taylor’s latest novel, everything is embarrassing, and he reminds us of it over and over again. A student confesses to his ex that he misses him; the ensuing silence is embarrassing. Making art is embarrassing. Wanting to make art but not being able to is embarrassing. Loving someone, wanting someone to love you back, losing something, being afraid of losing something—it’s all embarrassing.
Shame has arguably been the primary preoccupation of Taylor’s short, but highly acclaimed, fiction oeuvre. In 2020, Eren Orbey described Taylor’s debut, Real Life, as a “new kind of campus novel” forgoing the clichés that “dominate contemporary discussions” of university life. Its protagonist Wallace, a gay, Black, first-generation graduate student at UW-Madison, longs to abandon his biochemistry education (Taylor himself studied biochemistry there before publishing the book and instead pursuing writing at Iowa.) To cope, he fixates his energies outward, on an imagined notion of “real life” beyond campus. It is not until a tumultuous romance, Orbey writes, that Wallace realizes no such binary exists: the pain, rather, “is what makes it real.” When the book was released, I was a higher-education reporter in Madison and felt comforted as a new graduate in a foreign city. I interviewed Taylor for our newspaper, and he told me that he wrote Real Life, in part, to untangle his thoughts about vulnerability: “How does a person learn to be, and what happens if you can’t?” It is terrifying to not know the right way to be in the world, to yearn for whatever lies ahead, especially in an enclosed place surrounded by new people.
The Late Americans gets at this question beyond the scope of one student’s experience. The novel, about a group of graduate students and locals at the University of Iowa, reads like a marriage between—and expansion of—Taylor’s prior works. For one, the book is much less auto-fictive, extending the curiosity and sympathy Taylor afforded Wallace to a cast of complex, morally ambiguous characters. While the setting is reminiscent of Real Life, its form, alternating among characters without a clear protagonist, feels like an extension of Filthy Animals, Taylor’s short-story collection also set largely in the Midwest. Its storylines seem at first as though they could stand alone, until Taylor gradually reveals them to be subtly intertwined. Everyone knows someone who knows or is sleeping with or having an affair with somebody else. But he never sits too long with any one of them, instead forcing the reader to move all around town, to hear both sides, to feel excluded and rejected and overexposed. In doing so, Taylor achieves in The Late Americans an ever-expansive compassion toward the shameful minutiae of young adulthood and university life.
The novel opens with Seamus, who is in a graduate-level creative writing seminar, workshopping a classmate’s poem. It’s called “Andromeda and Perseus.” and includes a scene with post-coital menstrual blood on bedsheets, Beth’s attempt to subvert the classical myth of Perseus beheading Medusa. The poem is rife with imagery “re: women, re: trauma, re: bodies, re: life at the end of the world,” and praise abounds: “Raw.” “Real.” “Rigorous.” “Diamond sharp.” Seamus thinks otherwise (he hates it). He’s bored and exhausted by this weekly ritual, by his generation’s tendency to write incessantly about and dissect personal pain.
His classmates are, in turn, exhausted by Seamus, who is so paralyzed by his desire to write poetry that actually means something that he hasn’t produced any original work in months. Seamus sees the vapid Medusa poem as part of a burgeoning genre of confessionals cheapening the value of art: “This variety of poem often surfaced in seminar: personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works that failed to register genuine understanding of or real feeling for those works. Self-deceptions disguised as confession.” Seamus is that guy in every English seminar: a bit too eager to be contrarian, confident in his own noble intentions.
But soon enough, Taylor exposes the traumas of Seamus’s own life. After class, he volunteers at a nearby hospice center’s kitchen and prepares a tomato bisque. (Manual labor comes easily, a welcome distraction from the cerebral: “The frustration from seminar fell away from him. In this place, he was free of all that horseshit. It was just him and the sweating onions.”) Watching Seamus, another worker asks whether his mother taught him to cook. He ignores her, remembering his absent mother and his father’s death. Then comes the confession: “Seamus thought with a silly kind of meanness that if he were another kind of writer, a tacky writer, he could write about that.” He could write about the ordinary hurts that afflict everyone, the heartbreak of childhood neglect, just like Beth writes about sexual violence or Linda her abortion. He wants to—but can’t, because “he knew they would call it good, call it vulnerable, and what was worse than that?”
Seamus’s crippling search for understanding within academia perfectly preludes The Late Americans. In the proceeding chapters, Taylor introduces characters who share a tendency to treat campus life as though it means everything and nothing, at once precursor to and distraction from some more real, deferred thing. Ivan, whose tendonitis stripped him of a promising ballet career, pursues finance to support his family. Money is Ivan’s primary fixation, and the detached, fiercely practical rigor with which he studies it distracts from the grief of an abandoned passion. He lives with his wealthier boyfriend Goran, but even his love sometimes seems rooted in utility: “He could barely remember why they’d gotten together in the first place. But then if he left, where would he go? He couldn’t afford a place on his own. He couldn’t afford anything. He was at the end of a bleak period in his life… that would let him pay his parents back for all they had done for him. Goran didn’t understand that.” Domestic settings acutely reveal lovers’ tensions: Fyodor, a meat-factory employee, comes home after a long shift to a fight with Timo, a middle-class vegetarian. They break up—only to quickly get back together, retreating into a familiarity that ignores incompatible differences in worldview (or, more urgently, the fact that Timo is actually in love with Goran).
Emotional isolation is heightened in Taylor’s university environment, which breeds closeness and hypervigilance. Students peer through windows at neighbors’ parties, learn of affairs through chance encounters, and frequent a café buzzing with undergraduates Timo describes as “small, desperate creatures, fearful and alone in the world.” After Fatima, a dance student, is assaulted by a peer, her friends know within hours. But this enforced proximity rarely lends itself to true intimacy; rather, Taylor’s characters overcompensate for loneliness through nonchalance and physical self-indulgence. When Fatima’s friends attempt to comfort her, she is immediately embarrassed. “It’s the end of the world soon anyway,” she says, and shrugs. “Graduation. It’s not worth the hassle.” The novel is full of empty sex (someone thinks to himself that he doesn’t “seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection”) and fleeting acts of violence (a cup thrown at a wall, mentions of childhood abuse).
Meanwhile, spoken dialogue in the novel is often veiled and curt, perhaps a reflection of a brutal Midwestern winter. If Real Life captured the sticky drunkenness of a single summer weekend in Madison, a sultriness that lent even Wallace’s lowest moments a dreamlike quality, The Late Americans strips everything down to cold and lonely sinews. Taylor’s prose is full of choppy syntax and fragmented sentences, the dialog often naturalistically abrupt. One late night, Timo comes home to a birthday cake from Fyodor:
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thank you,” Timo said.
“I didn’t know when you’d be back. I thought earlier, but then. I don’t know. I think I fell asleep.”
“You did.”
“Sorry.”
“It was nice.”
“That feels like a loaded comment.”
Desperately hoping to make something of themselves, Taylor’s characters fail to reconcile deeper emotional desires with the reality that their immediate environment is not a place to escape, but rather the very territory in which “real life” happens. They would rather cut onions for soup than write the poems they want, or say the thing that needs to be said. Death lingers everywhere—for some as a flashback, others a looming reality. Not unlike those “wasting away” at the hospice center, who enjoy discussing extinct animal species, the younger characters’ morbid encounters serve not to lend gravity to their lives, but rather amplify their near-nihilistic detachment. Fyodor hears about a shooting in his home state of Alabama and convinces himself his mother is dead. Once he learns she is alright, he regrets having had the audacity to fear: “Fyodor felt stupid for feeling so worried. It seemed stupid to think that his life might intersect with the greater, terrifying course of life in the world.” Because he and his peers refuse to confront reality, to engage openly and in good faith with the people around them, Taylor suggests, everything becomes embarrassing. Terrifying. Stupid.
Yet Taylor observes his characters’ self-destructive coping mechanisms with measured distance and sympathy. In reading The Late Americans, it is difficult to see Taylor’s characters as pitiful or pathetic. Rather, even the most insufferable ones seem, if only at times, to be delicate, trying their best, and worthy of our understanding. When I spoke to Taylor about Real Life, he told me he didn’t care to write “one-dimensional bullies,” but to explore people from different places trying to exist alongside one another and honor them with grace and “the benefit of their own conviction.” Even with a more varied catalogue of characters, Taylor maintains a tenderness toward them that reflects a genuine interest in unraveling how they “learn to be” in the world. His dialog is indeed effectively spare, but some of the novel’s most candid confessions are revealed during glimpses into their consciousness. After learning about the bank shooting, Timo says the killer deserves to die, and Fyodor—as any weary, bitter lover would—immediately turns it back on him: doesn’t he think slaughtering animals for meat is cruel, too? He asks whether the death penalty isn’t just as bad. “Isn’t electrocuting him or injection or whatever, isn’t that just as bad?”
It was unfair of him to have said that to Timo, he knew. But Fyodor hadn’t been trying to win a fight. He had been trying to articulate something about what he felt and thought. He had wanted to ask why it was that people found it so much easier to extend charity to the anonymous herd beasts of the field than to other people. Loving people was hard. It was difficult sometimes to believe that they were good. It was hard to know them. But that didn’t mean you could just go on without trying. What he believed was that love was more than just kindness and more than just giving people the things they wanted. Love was more than the parts of it that were easy and pleasurable. Sometimes love was trying to understand. Love was trying to get beyond what was hard. Love, love, love.
Fyodor got out of his truck. His shift was starting back up.
The novel concludes without a clean resolution, each character still pursuing some version of “real life”—some emotionally, through their careers, and others literally, with fresh beginnings in New York and Kansas. To place one’s characters in such a charged, transient setting is to bring out both their most public and private selves, yet Taylor offers them grace, bringing the reader in to observe honest, edifying moments of interiority. Seamus, tortured for months after a traumatic sexual encounter, finally breaks down more than halfway through the book, as the memory catches up to him in crashing waves. When his friend Oliver gives him a hug, he almost cries. “It was so much the opposite of how it had been with Bert in the woods that night.” At a party, he hallucinates Bert watching him. “That was the winter of Bert. Lingering. Squinting in at Seamus out of every darkened windowpane and from every corner.”
Only then does Seamus overcome the writer’s block and finish a poem. He spends days in a trance, writing and rewriting and ripping it up until it comes to him. After he submits his work to be discussed in class, Oliver comes over to his apartment to congratulate him. They have sex, and for a brief moment, Seamus’s refined notion of art collapses, as his poetry enters the bedroom. But their emotions are entirely misaligned: Oliver, perhaps, starts desiring him after recognizing his talent, while Seamus despises the degradation of having been so open. Oliver asks him to recite the poem, but Seamus is “too embarrassed at that.” What he had dreaded most has come true: He told the world about the ordinariness of his suffering, only to be called brave, to be pitied and even wanted for it. His embarrassment expands into fury. Seamus thinks that he would like to eat Oliver whole, “to pay him back for coming here and being genuine in response to a poem.” But perhaps what he really desires is what he cannot bring himself to admit: a surrender to intimacy and honesty. He makes Oliver some bisque, then asks him to leave.