Reviews with content warning for Sexual assault - The Late Americans

this might go up .25 stars? not sure yet.

brandon taylor has such a way with words. the way he captures emotion and friendship and love and lust and anguish and grief, and the way all of those feelings interact, is tangible. what’s interesting about this book is i didn’t necessarily LIKE the characters, but they felt real to me, and i couldn’t help but empathize with their struggles. even characters i thought i didn’t like at all at first, like Timo, i eventually came around to seeing them as these super three dimensional beings - like real people! not sure this is making sense but it’s what i feel. my favorite characters were definitely fyodor, timo and fatima… though i liked seamus’ arc as well.

as someone who grew up in iowa city, i also LOVED all the iowa city references. the bread garden, the ped mall, the quad, the hawkeyes banners…. definitely made my little heart happy

Content Warnings

jesshindes's review against another edition

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emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

First book of the year is Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans. I enjoy following Taylor on Twitter, where he has lots of opinions about the kinds of classic authors that I enjoy (for example: he loathed the Netflix Persuasion adaptation), but I hadn't read his fiction until now. This felt very much like a novel in the tradition of the 19th century novel (I kept thinking of Henry James, but I don't know if that's just because of his title). I liked it. I'm going to write more about this book for the blog I'm starting - I'm planning to sit it against Howards End, so we'll see how that goes - but I wanted to get my first thoughts down here, too.

The book is set in Iowa City, where Taylor was a grad student at the Iowa Writers' Workshop (the longest-established and most prestigious creative writing programme in the USA) and where his characters are also mostly graduate students at the university, mostly in the arts, mostly coming to the ends of their study, mostly trying to figure out their place in the world as they emerge from that slightly suspended, in-between state of being a student (and especially being a student of something like poetry or dance). A lot of the book is very reflective as all of these smart artistic people try to understand what they want out of life and how they relate to other people within it, which is probably part of what gave it this Great Novel kind of vibe to me.

The chapters have different central characters (some recur, some don't); lots of the characters know each other. They all for some reason had really specific names, which is fine but which somehow confused me in my mind so it took me a while to remember who was Goran and who was Ivan and who was Fyodor (and writing this I wonder if half of these are like, references to specific writers that I should be thinking of, but probably not). Of course you end up comparing the characters when you encounter them this way and in reviews I saw that most people preferred Seamus, who is a poet and is caught in this very antagonistic relationship to most of the rest of his class (and honestly this book did not make me want to do the IWW, it is not a super appealing portrait of how the workshops go). I actually liked Fatima best who is one of only two female POV characters within the novel and who is in dance class but is looked down on by lots of her classmates because she has to work in a coffee shop to support herself. There's a scene where a classmate sexually assaults her and she goes to complain to the teacher about it and gets completely shut down which made me very! angry but which felt very accurately observed.

This question of artistic work versus work for money runs through the whole book and felt like a central part of what Taylor was exploring in it; tied up with that is a question about authenticity, and the idea that for a lot of people these ideas can be theoretical and ideological but that even to be able to debate these things (if you work for money alongside your art, are you a truly committed artist?) you have to be coming from an extremely privileged position, that there's a hypocrisy or inauthenticity built into that. Taylor is interested in how we perform for other people's judgement (very true when you're a student/when you're young but of course true for a lot longer than that) and his characters consciously grapple with this issue. That's a lot of what I mean when I say they're trying to figure out how and what they want to be. The book ends in what feels like quite a warm and generous place but of course it's not possible to boil all of these complex things down to one answer or one point of view, which is fine I think. I did feel satisfied by the end, and I'd read more Taylor. Like I said at the start, I feel like lots of the people I read are trying to push and do new weird idiosyncratic things but he's more interested in speaking back to a tradition, which I find an interesting and worthwhile thing to do (if you can pull it off!).

Content Warnings

megansmith's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

I have...a TON of conflicting feelings about this book. I think it's definitely a book that made me think and even for the parts that did frustrate me, maybe it deserves more praise just for getting me to think and for riling something up in me?

First, the writing in this book is really stellar. I don't know how much of it I'd chalk up to my 25+ years of living in the Midwest but, I felt transported to Iowa City throughout the length of this book. Taylor is a wonderful author and even in snippets I couldn't quite relate to the characters themselves, I could empathize with their feelings and get truly into their experiences through Taylor's writing. He grapples deep themes in a way that honors these character ages and life experiences. I especially appreciate his respect to the struggle characters face as they reckon with the world at large, while also holding on to where they grew up and how they got to where they are now. It's a constant struggle as a student that I think he wraps up nicely as you enter the last chapter. He's a masterful writer and you can tell he wrote from the heart in this book.

Outside of the themes and respect for the age and time in these character's lives, I struggled with the plot. And maybe for good reason but.. I'm not sure. Maybe it's in how the book is marketed? I feel like the cover of the book misled me to think maybe the characters would show a variety of the town, but, the majority of chapters felt like such a small circle of people, specifically this very tight knit group of queer men running into each other through distant connections. On it's own, I think that could have been it's own book! I found it really fascinating, even if I did not have the same exact experience when I was in college, I could find snippets of what I witnessed in college, seeing friends and mutual connections overlap over time without intending to. I think that's a really honest, interesting book premise and I would've been fine if the book was just that. However, adding in the last two chapters changed this in this book and honestly, it did a disservice to both sides of the book. It almost split this book in half. The only two female characters in this book didn't seem to see a single spot of happiness, either. All the characters have a struggle but, at least in the first few chapters, those male characters have small snippets of lightheartedness or connection through relationships, vs the two women in this book struggle in their past and present continually and only fall deeper into struggle as their brief chapters go on. Fatima maybe got it in the last page but,

even on a fun, "relaxing" trip for the rest of the crew, she's only seen as being offended because two male characters (who tbh do not treat her right and she deserves better!!) make references to her assault and then immediately regret it (dude, didn't yall learn from your friend making a mom joke after she got a freaking abortion?! good grief!), and then the rest of the time she's freaking cooking!

Also, it truly frustrated me all these male characters get referenced regularly in each other's individual chapters, but the one mention the one main female character gets,

it's a brief party appearance by name and then one other brief appearance where she drops she's getting an abortion to another male character...who says his brief "i'm sorry" and only makes things worse when it comes up again later in the book.

Last thing,

I do really resent the fact the two times you have women show up in this book, they both are sexually assaulted by men in their lives. I think there's a variety of experiences you could talk about in this book about the female experience, especially as it relates to college and the paths these women are taking. But you chose the same type of experience, back to back? This book discusses sex quite a lot but, contrasting the two women in this book not having any empowering or purposeful sexual experiences, vs having even just one chapter dedicated to the sex-obsessed Noah, felt so off

In short: it felt really frustrating to have a cover that boasted having a diverse cast of characters from different walks of life be in one place, only for two characters to feel tacked on rather than intentionally woven into the tapestry of these relationships, AND for those characters to fall into some pretty stifling stereotypes. I think some trimming down to re shift the narrative, or adding additional chapters and reworking some of the existing chapters, could have helped this book go a long way.

All in all - I do think this is a really smart, masterful look into a specific town and how the people within it are more connected than they all realize. Equally, I think this book falls flat on it's first promise on the cover, and I think it's what hurts this book from being touted more as a more all-encompassing expose. I wanted more from this but I still gleaned a lot from this book as valuable and important to read. So read at your own risk and also know I have my own biases and opinions that might be blinding me to important points in this book! I definitely want to read more about the book itself and try to understand why Brandon Taylor made certain choices here.

Content Warnings

raphynette's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Content Warnings

steph_ramos's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

Love Brandon Taylor’s writing, obviously very talented. I struggle with the themes and characters — they are somewhat hard to swallow. But it’s an enjoyable challenge.

I will say this is hardly a novel; it is much more reminiscent of his short stories “Filthy Animals” where the characters and stories are only loosely connected. That is what stopped me from connecting to this more. But the writing is beautiful and honest and challenging.

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