Austin Todd
The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor, Riverhead Books, 320 pages, $28
The Late Americans begins with a poet, on-the-nose-ly named Seamus and, truly, an electrifying asshole. He sits in the Iowa poetry seminar, mentally berating each of his peers, whose work he hates “not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.” Seamus is horrible and well-read; later (at work in the local hospice kitchen) we discover he’s also a blisteringly competent chef. I can’t help but recall Jeremy Allen White—the whole chef-wunderkind-reinvigorates-tired-hospice-kitchen situation is too wonderfully The Bear.
On a break, Seamus goes out for a smoke and bums one to an older man whose father is in the hospice. The man asks “You wanna see something?” and they go down the road a bit. Seamus ends up sucking him off in a scene rendered with sensitivity and uncringing verisimilitude—a laudable feat the novel achieves in its other sex scenes, too. (Taylor is masterful here, I mean, really: “He had wanted to be used. To be run over the edge of someone else’s want to sharpen it.”)
The two walk back up the path; the man says “I needed that” and Seamus smarts back: “Dying people make you hard or what?” Then the guy puts out his cigarette on Seamus’ face and nearly chokes him to death in the gravel. He’s a trucker-cap-wearing AIDS generation ball of internalized homophobia and repressed trauma, dropping f-bombs and apparently burning the faces of men he’s with (first a cig, second a scalding coffee) if they joke about the dead or dying. Seamus bikes home and feels briefly—terrifyingly—pursued when he spots a truck behind him that looks like the man’s. Fortunately, a pair of friends notice him, keep him company in a bar, and walk him part of the way home.
The next chapter centers on one of these friends, and nearly every subsequent one in The Late Americans (Brandon Taylor’s third book after his Booker Prize-shortlisted debut Real Life and short story collection Filthy Animals) follows suit, shifting its attention stepwise to somebody else. Among the cast there’s a man who works at a meatpacking factory and gets shit from his middle-class vegetarian boyfriend because of it, a soon-to-be-banker looking to pay back his working-class parents who spent everything on his dance education before his tendons gave out, a dancer working at a local café, another dancer whose sister got abducted from the family vacation home when he was young, and a pianist who “only ever brought it up [being black] when he got sad or drunk and talked about the money [from his rich white parents] he’d spent earlier that day.”
Often The Late Americans pushes these people into the complexity of intimacy. Beyond the above example with Seamus, Taylor offers a smattering of on-the-fritz relationships and spontaneous fucks. The men circumvent the post-AIDS “antisex and homophobic policings” of public space José Esteban Muñoz once commented on, turning trucks, abandoned RV parks, empty offices and laundromat bathrooms into sites of sexual potential. As a result, much of the novel’s drama turns on who’s with whom, who wants to be with whom, who’s filming softcore pornography of himself to make extra cash while still being with whom, who broke up with whom because of said porn-making, and so on.
But not all of The Late Americans’ intimacies are intimate. At the end of her standalone chapter, a lonesome children’s swim instructor sees her downstairs neighbor out on the street. He waves and she waves back—nothing more, but this brief moment of connection in her otherwise unpopulated life spurs her to think “it is enough.” But, girl, is it? You just spent a chapter alone at home, sculpting the hands of the university swim team girls you saw at the pool (you’re a trained sculptor? and a lesbian?) and then, sitting in the bathtub ruminating on how your mom didn’t notice or stop your dad’s maybe-not-quite-traumatizing but still-very-damaging treatment of you growing up. How is a hand wave enough?
Even when the potential for deeper connection arises, conversational barbs and scrappy conflict still course through the relationships. The pianist throws yogurt at his boyfriend’s head after he says something thoughtless and insensitive; Seamus shuts the door in a classmates’ face because he thinks the sex they just had was out of pity; a dancer, unnerved by being in the vacation home where his sister was abducted, snaps at another dancer, parroting what the man who sexually harassed her and faced no consequences texted after the fact: No hard feelings. Most of the time everyone makes up and sorries abound, but these apologies always ring hollow—quick fixes, never cures.
There are sweet moments, sexy moments, and really really profound ones, yes. But over and over Taylor’s constellation of individuals splinters; the merry-go-round of American life spins ever faster, and centrifugal force flings them apart. The Late Americans is not a cheery book; it’s a prognosis. A picture of postmodern life in the U.S., illuminated by a lightning strike. The book ends with a small subset of characters walking down a woodland path together. They are blissfully content in the post-rain morning, yet it feels artificial and transient—like the next piercing argument was simply left unprinted on the blank flyleaves at the end.
Formally, Taylor’s novel is difficult at times, because it doesn’t act like we might want a novel to. Our typical, conditioned expectation for contemporary fiction is that there is (at least) one overarching storyline. The slim bookstore volume we’re reaching for probably isn’t a Ulysses, but a reasonably-sized paperback with a tastefully simple cover. Not airport lit, but not modernist experimentation either. Exposition, rising action, climax and resolution. The Late Americans gently resists this dictate, its chapters as loosely connected as its characters. Funnily, the publisher tried to downplay this, claiming on the back cover that the book centers on just four characters, instead of leaving it “a loose circle of lovers and friends,” as they more accurately start with.
The Late Americans’ disconnectedness, its abandonment of plot in life’s slow, heavy tide, reverberates with the postmodern American meaninglessness its characters are set adrift in. The title, after all, appears to be a riff on the term which originates with the Frankfurt School and has become a breezy leftist hashtag: “late capitalism.” The University of Sydney’s website explains that online use of the slogan typically satirizes “notions such as the idea of endless growth.” What would a book titled The Late Americans satirize? What is specifically “late” American life? In Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, he writes that the late in late capitalism conveys
…the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.
Imagine a spider’s web. Not the neat kind, but one of the messy, haphazard ones. Each of Taylor’s characters is suspended in it, the silvery strands of a hand-wave or a hook-up holding them aloft above the gaping, titanic, all-pervasive maw of late capitalist, American meaninglessness. One of The Late Americans’ epigraphs comes from Louise Glück. “What are we without this?/Whirling in the dark universe,/alone, afraid, unable to influence fate.” We watch as they struggle with one another; we see the strands grow thin. We feel the hot, expectant breath from the creature below.
A romantic reading of The Late Americans is impossible because the book’s eye is so astringent, so realistically unromantic. Love, beauty, and human connection poke starlike through the wan late American expanse not because these things win out in the end, but because despite our common loss in capitalism’s game, despite our defeat so entire that our very capacity to imagine victory has atrophied, still we find each other, if only for a moment. The tragedy of postmodern existence The Late Americans probes is how terribly brief and crushingly infrequent these moments can be.