Brandon Taylor, _The Late Americans_

ADAM MARS-JONES's fiction reviews in the LRB so often sound like hatchet jobs that his praise of this novel caught my attention, and it turns out it is really good...so thank you, Mr. Mars-Jones.

The Late Americans is one of those pass-the-baton novels in which the narrative point of view is handed off to a new character every chapter. Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde, the "Wandering Rocks" episode of Ulysses, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, and Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth could serve as examples, but the first novel I encountered that took the principle to its logical conclusion--i.e., the narrative baton never returns to any character who has already had it once--was Wilton Barnhardt's Lookaway, Lookaway. I think the technique must be enjoying some kind of vogue, as it turns up in Yaa Gyaasi's Homecoming and Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other as well. (Also, I think, in David Szalay's All That Man Is, which I have not read but would like to.)

Taylor's is not a simon-pure example of the technique, as Seamus the poet provides our POV in the fifth chapter as well as the first, but generally the baton in The Last Americans keeps moving to a new bearer. Most of its characters are in graduate programs at the University of Iowa, generally in the arts (writing, music, dance) but one is getting an MBA, and a few are simply folks who live and work in Iowa City and have been drawn into the orbits of the students. Those orbits intersect and overlap all over the place, because most of the characters are young gay men who tend wind up in the same bars, the same parties, and, yep, the same beds. Two of the POV characters are women, but the novel feel largely like a portrait of the gay male scene in a small-to-mid-sized university town. 

But it also feels like more than that, somehow. The title suggest ambitions towards a the-way-we-live-now kind of novel, like Updike's Rabbit series. Such ambitions could be awkward in a novel set in so specific a milieu as a collection of U. of Iowa grad students, but surprisingly enough Taylor makes it work. The way we live now, the way we meet people now, the way we make art now, the way we plan for the future now, the way we try to start careers now, the way we have parties, break up, get in our own way now...so much of that is here, in just 300 pages. 

I did not spot much in the way of actual dates in the novel, but it seems to be set just shortly before Trump and the pandemic sent the-way-we-live-now over Niagara Falls in a barrel. And it feels very faithful to that time.

Really impressive. I plan to track down Taylor's other work.