Genre: Literary Fiction
Published: May 23, 2023
Pages: 315
In the shared and private spaces of Iowa City, a loose circle of lovers and friends encounter, confront, and provoke one another in a volatile year of self-discovery. Among them are Seamus, a frustrated young poet; Ivan, a dancer turned aspiring banker who dabbles in amateur pornography; Fatima, whose independence and work ethic complicate her relationships with friends and a trusted mentor; and Noah, who “didn’t seek sex out so much as it came up to him like an anxious dog in need of affection.” These four are buffeted by a cast of artists, landlords, meatpacking workers, and mathematicians who populate the cafes, classrooms, and food-service kitchens of the city, sometimes to violent and electrifying consequence. Finally, as each prepares for an uncertain future, the group heads to a cabin to bid goodbye to their former lives—a moment of reckoning that leaves each of them irrevocably altered.
A novel of friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.
A novel of friendship and chosen family, The Late Americans asks fresh questions about love and sex, ambition and precarity, and about how human beings can bruise one another while trying to find themselves. It is Brandon Taylor’s richest and most involving work of fiction to date, confirming his position as one of our most perceptive chroniclers of contemporary life.
A friend of mine won a copy of this book through Goodreads and had commented about not knowing so many words, so then she made me read it. This is my honest review.
This book's synopsis is very misleading. It gives the impression that there is an overarching narrative for the book, and that's just not the case. It even mentions a pivotal cabin trip that doesn't happen until page 277, and spoiler, nothing really happens at the cabin that didn't essentially happen in Iowa. Also none of the characters from the first two chapters (about 80 pages) even go to the cabin.
This book is really a collection of character sketches, which would make it great for an intro to creative writing course, and I say that as someone who took that kind of course three times because I was majoring in creative writing. Had the synopsis indicated that this was a collection of character sketches, I may have enjoyed it more. As it is, I spent the whole book wondering what the plot was and when everything would come together. For that reason I give this book 1.0732 out of 5 stars. - Katie
Brandon Taylor is the author of the novel Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Science + Literature Selected Title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded The Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He is the 2022-2023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers.
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