![]() But he is also happy for Seamus to be what Americans evocatively call a “jerk”. But what is it other than that? Is this a poem? It’s functionally equivalent to, what, like a slasher movie? A children’s story?” Taylor doesn’t shy away from painting Seamus as the one brave truth-teller in a self-deceiving mutual admiration society. Having heard a fellow student’s harrowing account of her abortion, Seamus is imprudent and ungallant enough to say, out loud, “It’s very, very moving. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation.” So much would place Taylor’s book in a long line of broadly conservative campus comedy from the 1980s and 1990s (Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, Richard Russo), drawing its energy from the excesses of campus liberals. Trapped in seminars where students share autobiographical writing heaving with self-pity and 21st-century activist clichés, Seamus is the only one willing to think the unthinkable: “This wasn’t poetry. The book begins within the point-of-view of Seamus, a creative-writing student who takes (his) poetry extremely seriously, and loathes – who can blame him? – the politicised and therapeutic attitude his fellow poetry students take to their vocation. He holds his characters to a high standard of truthfulness, and his own authorial sympathies turn out to be more evenly divided between the characters than they first seem. Yet Taylor is a more intelligent and ambivalent writer than that would suggest. ![]() ![]() So much could be a recipe for the worst kind of book, preachy and entirely in thrall to the navel-gazing obsession with racial and sexual identities that blights so many American campuses. They sleep with each other in various permutations and relentlessly analyse their lives and relationships with a combination of insight and delusion. Many of the characters are of mixed racial or national backgrounds many of them are gay or otherwise sexually nonconformist. Other characters are – to use a transparent euphemism – “supplementing” their meagre stipends with exhausting jobs at local hospices and meatpacking factories, resentful at the blithe nonchalance with which their friends take their own wealth for granted. Some of them are what are called “trust fund kids”, pursuing artistic passions without needing to worry overmuch about the costs of failure. The characters, whom Taylor follows over the course of an eventful year in their lives, are members of a loosely defined circle of friends and lovers. His setting this time is the Midwestern college town of Iowa City, known in literary circles for its influential creative-writing programme. Like Real Life, his 2020 Booker-shortlisted debut about the misadventures of a black biochemistry student, it takes place in and around an American university campus. Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, could just as plausibly be labelled a collection of “linked” short-stories involving an overlapping cast of characters.
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