Many writers try, but few capture, as Brandon Taylor does, the aesthetic texture of life under late capitalism in America: its petty cruelties, chewy atmospheres, and taut social relations. More expansive in terms of scope and characterization than his debut, Real Life – in which we view life mainly through the lens of a single protagonist – The Late Americans makes a tour into, through, and between the lives of a band of troubled souls living in an Iowa college town.
Raw sexual desire connects them where language otherwise fails.
First, we meet Seamus, an acerbic poet with a cynical heart who mercilessly judges the work of other (primarily women) poets in his class while struggling tortuously in private to write anything himself. Via Seamus, we meet Fyodor: working at a meat-packing factory by day, he argues with his aloof academic boyfriend, Timo, by night. Raw sexual desire connects them where language otherwise fails.
Via Timo and Fyodor, we meet graduate students Ivan and his boyfriend, Goran. Also deep in personal and shared malaise, both have choices to make about their future as individuals and as partners. A snapshot into the lives of these two couples provides an object lesson in asymmetrical power dynamics and the playing out of banal cruelties in ordinary domestic encounters. Fyodor is financially independent but bullied by Timo because of his – to Timo’s mind – ethically irredeemable job and lack of engagement with high culture. Ivan initially depends financially on Goran, who emotionally manipulates Ivan until he emancipates himself.
Ivan provides our subsequent introduction to Noah, a dancer in grad school. A social butterfly, Noah is a core connecting force between ostensibly disparate characters in the novel. He both works for and is sleeping with Bert, an older man whose gruffness bleeds into violence as he assaults both Noah and Seamus. We also meet two other dancers in Noah’s class – his friends Fatima and Daw. Fatima works in a café to make ends meet at grad school; Daw comes from an apparently wealthy family. During the telling of Fatima’s story, Taylor shows exceptionally well the operations of male power involved in silencing a victim of sexual violence. When Fatima reports one of her fellow dancers to her teacher, she is casually dismissed.
Each character is purposive and affecting in their own way – both on their own terms, and in the ways in which they variously swim in and out, stand at the periphery of, or abruptly enter and exit, each other’s lives.
It might be easy to lose oneself in the tangled web of characters and their stories; to become frustrated by the work of accounting for them all in the act of reading. However, to abandon such a task would be to overlook the careful intricacy of the web Taylor weaves. Each character is purposive and affecting in their own way – both on their own terms and in the ways in which they variously swim in and out, stand at the periphery of, or abruptly enter and exit, each other’s lives.The novel expertly cultivates complicatedness and refracts representation, and readers are caught in the discomfiting act of shifting our perspective. Bert is violent and toxic, but he is also marked by trauma and capable of a gruff sort of intimacy; Timo is cruel to Fyodor but also capable of deep friendship; Seamus is both hard to like and eminently relatable.
All share the experience of navigating life in the wretched impasse of late capitalism, and I found myself thinking of Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism at multiple points. Berlant’s devastating critique of the failure of neoliberal governments to deliver on their promise of ‘the good life’ is very much at play here. Optimism is cruel, for Berlant, when we continue to pursue objects that, in reality, prevent us from flourishing. The Late Americans confronts these objects at both macro- and micro-level. Time and again, characters find themselves lost for words, saying the wrong words, or trying to grasp a sense of something profoundly disturbing in their midst that they can’t articulate a way through or around.
Burbling themes of tension, minor cruelties and kindnesses, and of language failing or misfiring continue to play out in this setting – but something else is foregrounded: hope.
When thinking about the novel’s end, however, I turned to Foucault, whose History of Sexuality v.1 has inspired queer-thinking writers and scholars to consider new forms and modes of relating to one another. The Late Americans concludes with a group of characters taking an end-of-semester break together in the woods. Burbling themes of tension, minor cruelties and kindnesses, and of language failing or misfiring continue to play out in this setting – but something else is foregrounded: hope. There is intimacy, the alluring potentiality of release enwrapped in the possibility of sex, the actual release of sex, and – such a rare thing – a capturing of the present moment, stilled in time, and held, fleetingly, in its sensorial magnitude. Fatima asks Daw: “are you happy here?” and Daw thinks to himself:
What was happiness? He looked out ahead of them at their friends. Climbing over the large roots. Pushing one another, pulling one another, falling apart, coming together, kissing, hugging, laughing. The low sky, beautiful and heavy and gray. The trees. The rich, dark colors of the woods. The smell of the lake. Of people’s homes. The wet earth. What was happiness if not this moment, if not then, right then, the group of them, together for maybe the last time, coming together for this moment, for this very instant, what were they if not happy?
Few contemporary writers can behold the leaden weight of social injustice and grease its wheels with such skill and purpose as Taylor does in his storytelling.
Brandon Taylor is among the emerging literary giants of this cultural moment. Few contemporary writers can behold the leaden weight of social injustice and grease its wheels with such skill and purpose as Taylor does in his storytelling. Most of all, though, he is unrivaled in his ability to squeeze every last drop of juice from ordinary interpersonal encounters in all their rich and complicated strangeness, even, perhaps especially, when language fails.
