BRANDON TAYLOR The Late Americans. Reviewed by Jessica Stewart

Are the young aspiring artists in Brandon Taylor’s novel destined to be the last of their kind?

The characters in The Late Americans are in their mid-twenties – elite graduate students in the arts at a mid-western university town: Seamus the poet, dancers Noah and Fatima, Stafford the painter. This is a coming of age novel, a reckoning with adulthood which may have begun in adolescence but is still in progress. It is a fraught time.

The novel opens with a small group of poetry students discussing a work dealing with sexual violence against women. Blood and suffering and personal experience are wrapped in a 15-page single-spaced poem, which is met with a warm chorus of approval. Seamus splits from the others whose accolades, he says, misread their role as poets. Personal trauma clothed in shallow allusions to the canon or to critical theory – ‘pretentious linkage’ – does not make art. ‘Are you a poet or a caseworker?’ he asks, and receives with weariness the opprobrium he knew would follow. He does not have the answers. His own work has stalled.

It is a cruel numbers game for this group, whose work (worth) is weighed in a short window of audition and submission; the nightmare of peer review is merely a taster. There is a Darwinian attrition, the whittling down of their number until what remains is an exhausted and compromised but cooler, clearer cohort.

Ivan was a dancer, cut down by injury and now finishing his MBA. His observation of the female dancers is poignant: these ‘skinny women’, he thinks with affection. They are young for their age – their teenage years given over wholly to ballet. Goran and Timo are musicians, prodigies, but as Timo drily reflects,

… maybe everybody was a prodigy if they worked hard enough and long enough … Perhaps what people misjudged for prodigious talent was really just unexpected competence.

They joke about the mythic stature of law school or med school or high finance, but it is painful. Ivan looks to a prestige internship and career in New York, but he would give it all away to dance again. The lure is being able to send money home after a decade or more of watching his parents sacrifice to fund ballet school. Timo exchanges music for maths and teaches at the university but, grading papers, he feels he has not taught his students well.

This is a university town and class privilege is a constant presence. Fatima is one of the few who supports herself, working in a café. One dancer justifies coming from wealth as not only a necessary element to his success but perhaps for all of them. The intensity required by their vocation is too hard without the cushion of financial support.

The students and the townies are not so different, though. The women at the hospice where Seamus works in the kitchen elude him; he yearns to be noticed but they are unreadable; they are not impressed, they know he is unformed. Bert, an older man, is available for casual rough sex with more than one of the students and is dangerous, unpredictable. He lashes out with violence, but so does Goran, the trust fund baby who hurls a glass at the wall in an argument. From the comfortable middle class, Timo cannot reconcile his failure as a musician and is cruel to Fyodor, his partner, a butcher at the meat-packing plant. Fyodor instantly registers the surprise of Timo’s friends from the university when he does something they consider out of character – something gentle, clever, skilled. His insight far exceeds theirs.

While the novel is richly drawn, its ensemble of characters complex and sympathetic, the women occasionally feel like walk-ons. Fatima is the only woman with any substance, and one character, Bea, has the bones of something more but we only see her once and she would have been best left out altogether.

Beyond the role of art, and who gets to make art, the novel debates the limits of permissibility, limits stretched to breaking in 2025. When a media storm descends on an academic who uses a derogatory term, she is unapologetic, becoming a commentator who is interviewed on national television. The ‘late Americans’ of the title may be the last in America’s brutal purging. First published in 2023, The Late Americans sees the lines being drawn.

And yet, there is hope. Perhaps humanity can be saved. Ivan says to Goran, ‘I just want you to be nice to me.’ He and Goran work towards a future together with greater understanding. With hope there is also maturity, an adult trust in oneself. Seamus labours for days to create something real to bring to the class. Finally, ‘[h]e understood that the more right something felt to him, the less it truly did have to do with how it felt to others.’

Brandon Taylor The Late Americans Vintage 2024 PB 320pp $22.99

Jessica Stewart is a freelance writer and editor. She can be found at www.yourseconddraft.com where she writes about editing, vagaries of the English language and books she’s loved.

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Tags: ambition, American fiction, arts students, Brandon | Taylor, class privilege, dancers, poets, university towns