These chapters however felt somewhat unfinished, not quite meandering but unfocused, in a way that the short stories in Filthy Animals certainly didn’t. With the exception of Seamus, each character is given one single chapter that favors their perspective.
In many ways, The Late Americans suffers from an identity crisis: does it want to be a coming-of-age novel following a group of grad students, friends supposedly, a la Real Life? Does it want to be a series of interlinked short stories like Filthy Animals? Could it be both? Maybe, but The Late Americans struck me as a somewhat clumsy attempt at merging these two different structures. That is not to say that this was an entirely ‘unsatisfying’ read but since I have come to hold Taylor in high esteem and I ‘just’ expected something more from him. This latest release by Brandon Taylor reads less like an elaboration and expansion of those themes and dynamics we can find in his previous works and more like a rehash that sadly doesn’t feel as focused, cohesive, or satisfying as neither Real Life nor Filthy Animals. What he and all the other people on this site were doing was harvesting such moments, not through happenstance or spontaneity but using some apparatus of mass production.” “Life was full of such moments, the self momentarily exposed. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives-a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.Ī novel of intimacy and precarity, friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life. At the group’s center are Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicates her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These three are buffeted by a cast of poets, artists, landlords, meat-packing workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of Iowa City, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence.
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. The author of the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling Filthy Animals returns with a deeply involving new novel of young men and women at a crossroads
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