We didn’t set out to make a formal book club between the two of us, but this year, the Missus and I decided we would read some books together. She got a membership at the local Barnes and Noble she wanted to use, so I perused various lists of the ‘Best Books of 2023’ and found three choices that I thought we might like and she picked The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor.
The basic blurb on the inside cover was tantalizing: “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.” Being residents of the town in question, I think we were both intrigued by the possibilities- as I think anyone would be if they found their town mentioned on the inside of a book that’s got some critical hype going for it.
Taylor got an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, so he’s spent enough time here to get the overall feel of the place correct. He doesn’t get bogged down in the details of the place, however: there are references to a Sayre Hall, which doesn’t exist. There are references to North Hall, Art Building West, and the Visual Arts Building which are all real places. I don’t know if he specifically says the dance studios are in North Hall (I believe some are) but the description of them could easily fit Halsey Hall as well (where the Dance Department is currently housed.)
The bars are (obviously) George’s and The Foxhead, both real places. The street names are real street names and the descriptions of the Rec Center Pool where Bea teaches lessons and the Ped Mall in summer are both true to life and incredibly accurate. Taylor approaches the setting with a light touch, preferring to keep the focus on his characters (for obvious reasons)- but brings enough authenticity to it that a reader who is familiar with Iowa City will recognize it, but that a reader who isn’t won’t feel like it’s been embellished or idealized by the author.
His language is sparse but incredibly effective:
They were in the cafe. It was Monday. The rain was cold, but the sky was bright, silver almost. There was ice on the ground.
Short, sharp sentences, but the economy of the language tells you exactly what you need to know. You don’t have any trouble picturing where these two characters are and what the weather is like.
Another good example:
Noah had been raised on Laura Ingalls Wilder and bad Chinese takeout.
Again- perfect. A single sentence packs so much information about the character into a dozen words. The sparsity of his language can lead to some incredibly beautiful imagery and moments throughout the book- probably too numerous to mention, to be quite honest. The writing in this is beautiful.
The characters and the story, on the other hand, left me sort of scratching my head.
First of all, I’m a cis-gendered, hetero-white dude. I have no knowledge of queer spaces except from the perspective of an outsider. There’s no other way to put this, so I’ll be blunt: dudes are hooking up in this book. Like a lot.
Most of these characters are in that sort of late college/grad student phase of life where the idea that you could have a crowd of friends you run with and your lives and love lives and intimacies all get intertwined and messy and complicated feels very true to me, most of the time. There is a moment where Seamus (tortured poet) who has an encounter with Bert at the Hospice House where he works that’s unpleasant and a little violent is at the same party with him. (Since Bert hangs out with/employs/hooks up with Noah, who is throwing the party.) The encounter between the two, early in the book is vivid and traumatic— but at the party, if the two see each other, it’s not remarked upon and doesn’t seem to impact Seamus one bit. It’s… odd.
Second of all— and this is going to sound strange, sometimes these characters felt a little over-engineered to me. Timo (vegetarian) is in a relationship with Fyodor (meatpacker). Goran (upper middle-class with white parents) is friends with Timo (upper middle-class with non-white parents.) In terms of the novel, I’m willing to sort of accept that characters can be reflections of one another. But it’s a discordant contrast with the amount of realism that Taylor brings to the novel. The way this crops up from time to time is noticeable and it doesn’t land well, because it doesn’t work that way in real life.
Third of all, this is a very male book. Fatima is the only major character that gets significant time in the narrative. (Bea gets a chapter, but I’ll get to her in a minute) but other than the Seamus’ co-workers at the Hospice House in the very first chapter and his fellow grad students in his poetry seminars there really are not that many female characters in this book. (Again, I am willing to chalk this up to a general lack of knowledge about queer spaces and how they work, but it’s noticeable.)
Finally, we’ve got to talk about how he structures the book. It’s strange… we start with Seamus in the first chapter and then get introduced to other characters (Goran, Timo, Fyodor, Ivan, Fatima, etc) over the subsequent chapters that Seamus sort of intersects with now and again in the first chapters. Seamus figures out his poem, it gets good feedback in the seminar and that’s the last we see of him.
There’s also a Chapter about Bea. Bea lives alone and Noah waves at her and notices her but other than that, she doesn’t interact with the characters at all. She just has a random chapter in this book.
None of the characters we start the book with, wind up at the end of the book—, Daw— who is one of the dancers, moves to center stage for the final chapter, but of all the characters that get face time in this book, it’s only Ivan, Goran, Noah, Stafford, Daw and Fatima that trek out to the cabin in the Adirondacks for one last weekend together. We find out that Daw’s sister was kidnapped when he was eight- which seems like a major piece of character information to drop in the last chapter.
I’m going to give Taylor the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe he structured it this way to illustrate how people are sort of a constantly shifting collection of Venn diagrams at this point in their lives. You overlap with them once, twice, maybe more, maybe less, but sometimes you never cross paths with them again. But if the idea of the structure was something like that, he didn’t stick the landing with it. Instead, the reader is left with random threads (Bea) and incomplete threads (Seamus, Timo, and Fyodor), and just a chosen few characters who get one last moment together before heading out into the real world. It’s messy in the way life is, so that makes sense to me, but as a reader, it was made for an odd experience.
Overall: Extremely well-written, Taylor captures that sort of ‘end of college, off to the real world’ moment in time perfectly. There are some odd moments here and there and structurally, while the messiness of the characters sort of wandering in and out of each other’s lives might reflect real life, as a reader that messiness bothered me. My Grade: *** out of ****