Brandon Taylor (2)Críticas

I didn't quite enjoy this, but then again I am not overly fond of clearly autobiographical, "social issue" novels by debut novelists. Still, these are the core concerns of the vast majority of debut novelists, so I can't complain too much. My doubts were more to do with the emptiness of many of the characters and the overall milieu; perhaps I am just becoming too aged and decrepit to care about the easily emotional lives of the youth?

Lest I sound cruel, Taylor's literary style is exacting, beautiful, often poignant, able to conjure up realistic social moments of the zeitgeist as competently as more lyrical emotional passages. I will be keen to read what Taylor does next.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Taylor's debut novel for me is uneven, with insightful and smartly written passages intermixed with overwritten duds that could have benefited from an editor's strikethroughs and a well drawn central character (sharing strong biographical similarities with the author) surrounded by weaker secondary characters - perhaps the ingredients of a talented writer's debut novel, then.

Wallace is nearing completion of graduate school in biochemistry but is unhappy, seemingly resigned to feelings of alienation and otherness. Over a weekend in the present day, with bits of his past parceled out as the story moves along, his reasons become clear. Black, poor, and gay, Wallace had left rural Alabama for grad school in the Midwest with high hopes for the new life opening up before him, which many a student can relate to (I think of Marianne in Rooney's Normal People, on the verge of leaving her small oppressive town for university in the capital, feeling that life will now finally begin).

The reality was disillusioning. The only black student in his program, Wallace experiences the bigotry of low expectations from his program head, his fellow students, even his (mostly) well-meaning group of friends. Naturally introverted, he withdrew into himself, but he is now shaken up on the one hand by an unexpected and explosive romantic relationship with one fellow student, and on the other by a long running animosity directed his way from another student blowing up and calling his desire to remain in grad school into question. Thrown off balance, he is forced to consider what he actually wants, and how his personal history affects how he interacts with others. No final answer is forthcoming in these pages - it is about the dawning of this awareness.

Taylor writes searingly of the near constant background radiation of racist attitudes in which Wallace has to swim alone. Moments that are skipped over or given a mere awkward brief notice by his white friends are unforgettable dispiriting hurts to Wallace, and they accumulate.

Emma puts her head on Wallace's shoulder, but she won't say anything either, can't bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it. That's the frustrating part. Wallace is the only one for whom this is a humiliation.

Taylor also writes convincingly of why people seem existentially driven to pair up, to join their life with another's:

This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other's hands and they hold on as tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not.

These gems fight for attention in the novel with other overdrawn scenes, like a game of tennis in which we learn far too much about Wallace's strengths and weaknesses on the tennis court, and with distractingly over-detailed writing, such as - and this is just pulled from near the end of the book because I just read it and it's the most recent example in my mind - "Wallace fries the fish quickly, turning each piece just as it begins to brown so that it is crispy but not dry or burned." I mean, just say "Wallace fries the fish quickly" and end it!

In sum, a timely novel with some real strong points that Taylor will likely surpass with later novels.

Stopped reading about one-third of the way through. Strong first chapter, then tedium and tedious characters. Might have gotten better, but I had had enough.

I liked this a lot. Taylor takes a cast of characters, most but not all MFA students in the arts and writing programs, most but not all young queer guys, most—no, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say all—in the process of figuring out who they are and what they want. Which sounds like it could be the insipid framework of any number of that kind of story, but it's not at all. Taylor's a lovely writer, observant of people and their circumstances, and of the human spirit, and he really cares about his characters—which makes the reader (this reader, anyway) feel generous toward them too, even when they're difficult. It's not a plotty book, and some of the characters show up and then just drift out of the frame. But that's life, which is what this very warm book is about, and I'm good with that.

Well written but violent and sad. Mostly sad. Unhappy people being unhappy. Even when the words were saying they were happy or at ease they were not happy and very ill at ease. Strange tale.

4.5 rounded up. This is an excellent debut but brace yourself for a painful read. There is so much here - overwhelming loneliness, sexuality, violence, friendship, body issues. The description of the experience of racism in academia, the feeling of isolation and the inevitability of it all, is unforgettable.

The Late Americans was an interesting reading experience for me. I went out and bought it on the basis of a local bookstore billing it as “the book everyone is fighting about on Twitter”. I haven’t been able to find any evidence of this fighting but I also didn’t look too hard and was mostly just glad this possibly apocryphal designation got me to read the thing.

This is a novel about a series of vaguely interconnected grad students in a liberal arts college in Iowa. Everyone is more or less unhappy and messed up in their own unique ways and while the plot doesn’t move forward so much as wander, meander, mosey, and turn around and ask for directions, I still found it to be a very compellingly propulsive experience. Each character felt like a real individual, with all the complexity, irrationality, and banality that comes with being human. I wanted to know more about these characters, to spend more time in their heads even as part of me craved a more traditional story pacing. The author’s evident skill was certainly an asset in this roaming narrative, the prose was sparse yet utterly well-crafted with frequent beautiful sentences.

Taylor manages to capture the misunderstanding and jagged emotions around things like race, sexuality, and class, and the whole book thrums with the tension of those elements as they’re represented in a single, loose knit, friend group. Without seeming to truly take sides, the author shows you the lived reality of all these disparate characters and how they understand, and misunderstand, each other. The novel struck me as an ultimately hopeful mediation on the importance of connection, even, or maybe especially, the tenuous connections we form as we’re starting to embark on our adult lives.

This novel written by Brandon Taylor is epic genius. His use of language is mythic. Here are a few examples:

“How to wrangle a body that is unreal. The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness and use it to slice us to the bone.”

“The tears are collecting along his eyelashes, their warm salt welling.”

The love story between Miller and Wallace is other worldly. The novel builds to violent tender love making that will leave you wrecked.

I was concerned during the first half of the book when the College detail relating to the research Wallace was performing seemed pointless. Even after finishing the novel I’m not sure why the author found it necessary to go into such minutia.

But the last half makes the reading trip beyond worthwhile.

the writing is SO good, and taylor very effectively projects feelings of loneliness unto the reader. i am generally bothered by third person narration, but i think it was important in telling this story. i also think the title is very accurate for the plot—it’s sort of mundane with mostly unpredictable, small doses of drama, much like...real life. however, despite all of these positive qualities, it fell flat for me. i didn’t eagerly reach for it the way i normally do with my current reads. i did dog-ear particularly brutal or poignant passages, as he writes them so well, and because they certainly exist within these pages, but i will probably pass it along.

This was a bit of a disappointment, as I’ve been looking forward to this one for a long time. Pretentious purple prose (that was occasionally lovely, admittedly!) and characters that I just couldn’t understand. It was atmospheric and melancholy, but the lack of plot was just too lacking. I think in a writer’s workshop I’d give the feedback that some characters should be combined; there was this endless cast of friends and grad cohort members that was confusing - even in this short little meditation on a single weekend! I will be checking out future works by this author but hoping for more plot and character arc!

The Late Americans is called a novel, but is very nearly a connection of linked short stories, following a group of graduate students from about October to the spring of their final year in Iowa. Some are poets, some are dancers, all of them are horny and still figuring out this thing called life.

The story begins with Seamus in a class critiquing a poem, and ends with Daw, Noah, Fatima, and several others that we've met along the way having a party before they all go their separate ways. Most of the characters are gay men and there's sex or masturbation in just about every chapter, which was a lot for me, personally (though it didn't seem to be particularly sexy, more about the age and stage in life they were in?). There's not a lot by way of plot, but each chapter gives sort of a character study of one or more of the grad students. And Taylor can write: some of his sentences and observations are perfection, and that, ultimately is what kept me reading.

Well-written and inspired an interesting conversation at work. Could be frustrating to read at parts, just out of too much empathy for the character or situation. Although I often did not enjoy reading it, I did enjoy thinking about it and recognize the care that went into the flaws and nuance of the characters.

I didn't finish this. The prose is very academic. That is to say, it's one of those books that is clearly written by a creative writing professor, and the attention to the craft gets in the way of the actual story. The dialog felt really stilted, and the author is trying so hard to "show not tell" and strip out every unnecessary detail that what is left feels very naked. The characters are going through some major emotional trauma, and yet the book feels completely devoid of emotion. Maybe that's the point - maybe the main character's depression is so overwhelming that he is numb, and therefore the book is numb.... but it made for very difficult and ultimately unenjoyable reading.

I liked all of Taylor's characters, but I had a hard time figuring out how all of these stories fit together, or if they even did, despite Lionel/Charles/Sophie's story being woven throughout.

I hope this book wins the Booker prize. It won't, but I still hope it does. Taylor introduces the reader to a protagonist that many of us would never meet in real life and makes him come alive. Wallace is a graduate student, gay, and black, and I just loved his character. This book highlights how hard it is to be different while showcasing the natural empathy that lives within all of us. His characters were not caricatures . . .they were so well rounded, the bad and the good residing in each. Relationships ebbing and flowing like they do in real life. It's an emotional story that is restrained, and I liked the tension.

The plot could have been a little more complete for me; I definitely was left with questions. But I'd pick up another book by this author without hesitation.

UPDATE: I've been thinking about this book all afternoon. I'm upgrading to 5 stars. It's a subtle book that illuminates the hard truths of human nature. Seriously hope this book wins the Booker.

Couldn't get into it at all..too much dialog for my tastes and felt the story was a bit lackluster; but that's just me. DNF

I seem to be the odd one out here but I really didn't like it. It was so incredibly boring, I could barely get through it. Normally short story collections have at least one story that I like but literally nothing happened in any of the stories other than a bunch of people having sex and then talking about how they had sex. It got to the point that I got bored within the first few sentences of a story because I just knew it wasn't going to be good. Also, I didn't care at all about Lionel/Sophie/Charlie and every time another story brought them up, I had to switch to reading another book because I just... couldn't do it. The prose was fine and that's really the only positive I can think of here.

Repetitively painful, cant understand how it received a Booker nomination. Get on with your "real life", in the laboratory. Also get "real friends".

When I look at the ratings people have given this book I feel like I must have been listening to a different book. Despite the title the plot of this book is about as far from "real life' as I could ever imagine. The main character, Wallace, is a gay black man working on his doctoral thesis in a predominately white university town. The premise sounds good but it didn't work for me. Wallace may or may not finish his lab work for his thesis but he doesn't seem too worried about all the problems he encounters. He may or may not be in love with Miller who may or may not be heterosexual. He may or may not be grieving for his recently deceased father. He just didn't seem to have any firm feelings or beliefs so he didn't seem "real" to me.½

Wallace leads a life completely alien to my own experience yet Taylor's choice to not single out any one aspect of Wallace's identity created a multidimensional, relatable protagonist. I felt the author captured that time in life where you are headed down a road and begin to see that there may a fork in the not-to-distant future.

Short stories- not all "linked", though some include our main protagonists: maths student, Lionel- B;lack, gay, getting back into life after a suicide attempt- and the couple he meets: both dancers, in an ambiguous relationship...
It's powerful writing, themes of tensions in relationships, coping with being gay...

I loved the first three-quarters of this book and was full of anticipation about where Taylor was going to go with it, but in the last quarter it lost me and turned me off.

Wallace, the protagonist, is mentally sliding into a bleak place over the course of the weekend that the book is centred around. A minority black and gay man in a predominantly white Midwestern US grad school, his feelings of not belonging - both socially and academically - come to a head in a weekend of despair and confusion as he puts the barriers up higher between himself and his closest circle of friends, all the while embarking on a new sexual relationship with one of his straight male friends.

Yes, I know this is supposedly a novel of great depth about wounds and being fractured and being on the outside looking in, but in the end I grew tired of being 'told' by the main character of his great inability to fit in and his terrible childhood trauma, all in the midst of a bizarre sudden intense relationship with the rough, straight guy that he gets on with the least out of his friends.

I could feel no sympathy for Wallace by the end of Taylor's handling. He was a depressed guy who wasn't happy with where he was and knew of no other direction to go in, but I really couldn't have cared either way by the end. It all felt a bit directionless and flat.

3.5 stars - a strong start but lost my attention somewhere along the way.½

Content Note: child sexual abuse, sexualized violence, (critical treatment of) racism

Plot:
Wallace works on his doctorate in Chemistry at a small Midwestern university. His life is spent mostly in the lab, with occasional meet-ups with his friends, most of whom are also pre-docs in Chemistry. Wallace, being the only Black person in the lab, coming from a poor background and being one of the few queer people at university, doesn’t feel like he belongs, but so far he has muddled through. But over the course of one weekend, the balance he has found in his life shifts considerably, though.

I expected Real Life to not be a happy book, but I didn’t quite anticipate just how heavy it would be (content notes in the book would have been nice). That being said, it is a sign of how well-structured and well-written it is to make you feel this weight. And it is certainly worth subjecting yourself to it.

Read more on my blog: https://kalafudra.com/2022/03/22/real-life-brandon-taylor/½

i think this is a book that suffers from its marketing a little; it's not really a collection of linked short stories, not in the way i understand "linked" anyway. thematically - absolutely, the themes of violence and humanity are woven through these stories expertly. but there's one thread that runs through the book and other pieces fitted in between and around it and, i don't know, maybe i was being stupid, but i kept expecting everything to draw back to that main story somehow. at any rate, it doesn't, and i wasted my sense of anticipation on some perfectly good writing.

if you've read "real life," this one covers some of the same ground thematically, and i felt that "real life" did it fresher, more compellingly. but i also think it could just be that i prefer a narrative novel to a short story collection. anyway! i liked it. taylor really is the master of the unsettling.½

this book is very good, and very fucking heavy. miserable and frustrating at times, but also, i feel like that's the point. as someone who has indeed been through the grad school machine, and for science too, there were parts of this that really, really hit. the parts of this story that were foreign to me are places not for me to comment, but to listen.

i think the writing is at times extraordinary and captivating, and of course, this book does my favourite thing ever, which is taking place over the space of a very limited timespan. i absolutely devoured it. i think it's one of those things where you feel obliged not to look away - i think, "enjoyed" is not the word for my relationship to this narrative. (except for the moment when wallace blew it up at the dinner party, when i was full on howling, though i'm not sure if i was meant to take so much glee in that.) i enjoyed the writing, certainly, i luxuriated in it. and as for the story - as for the discomfort - i sat with it.

i do think everyone should read this.