The Late Americans

Reviews

The Late Americans is remarkable. If you're going to write about art, the folly of pursuing it and the irrefutable power of it, you should probably do it well. Taylor does it truthfully and beautifully Brandon Taylor has both a classic sensibility, expansive and elegant, and a razor-sharp ability to speak to the contemporary moment. The Late Americans is a full expression of his singular talent A dizzying plunge into the lives of young people making art in America in the era of survival capitalism, grappling over the big questions like they're fighting over a gun. Deep within their ambitions, their pettiness and lust, is the meaning and even grandeur they seek - and whether or not his characters ever find it, Brandon Taylor has. A bravura performance on the edge of a knife Elegant... Taylor has a Chekhovian generosity that enables him to convey character with something like tenderness... The relationships move like an eighteenth-century quadrille, at once restrained and spritely... Taylor's vision is unsparing, but never bleak Sensitive and unflinching… The Late Americans is thoroughly contemporary Assures and deepens Taylor's position as one of the most accomplished, important novelists of his generation. He is undoubtedly on to something expansively new in his sense of what the contemporary novel can do I loved The Late Americans and its funny, merciless, brilliant portrayal of the beauty and pointlessness of art, and the absurdity and horror - and occasional transcendence - of being a person. Magnificent Brandon Taylor's third book is the most dazzling example of his sharp pen and keen observations of human nature... Taylor develops his characters so precisely, they feel like close friends: recognisable, sometimes infuriating, and always worth following to the book's last page Taylor is a sharp chronicler of the body. In The Late Americans, the body is an instrument and an archive, vulnerable to the complicated violence of pleasure and work Taylor's most accomplished book, a panorama of youth in the era of late capitalism Expand reviews