The Late Americans – Brandon Taylor
Expectation: Honestly, I’m not sure but it wasn’t a short story collection masquerading as a novel.
Reality: Interesting concepts overshadowed by unlikable characters and absolutely zero plot. While a step forward in writing for the author, this was a dull read.
My Take:
I’ve got some problems with Brandon Taylor’s second novel “The Late Americans,” and it stems more from marketing than Mr. Taylor himself, but he’s not completely absolved of blame either.
First, let’s stop calling short story collections novels, okay? For this to work you need a singular character that looms large over the pages, whose presence has a more than tangential connection to all the characters. A great example of this is Elizabeth Strout’s “Olive Kitteridge.”
“Americans” doesn’t have an Olive, instead it has a city — in this case Iowa City, home of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop — and, no offense to the Hawkeyes, but not enough interesting happens there to make it a dynamic, connective thread between our half dozen main characters and half dozen ancillary characters.
Second, there is absolutely no plot to this novel. Zero. Even “the moment of reckoning” teased on the dustjacket is so incidental I feel for the copywriter who was trying to pull something — anything — of interest to entice a reader.
My husband and I were listening to this on a road trip (through Iowa, coincidentally) and we stopped the narration every 45 minutes for a “Padam, Padam” break because we were getting sleepy.
All-in-all, it wasn’t unenjoyable but it certainly wasn’t a page turner. Had this been positioned as a short story collection my expectations would have been vastly different, but this was billed as a novel, so it’s going to get critiqued as one.
I appreciate that Taylor went bigger and bolder with his follow-up to “Real Life.” In essence he wrote his own Russian novel, but rather than aristocrats we had a bunch of queer, horny intellectuals and artists relishing in the final euphoric months of the university bubble before the real world steamrolls them.
Even with all the sex I was still bored, and that’s because Taylor beat his points to death, which made every single character unlikable. Usually I’d relish in a diatribe against class politics, the urban/rural divide, cancel culture, racism and the Catch-22 of higher education economics, but the author made it clear each character was assigned a role and a point of view and that was that.
The first half was the strongest, mainly because it featured a trio of interesting characters (Seamus, Ivan and Fyodor). However, the narrative lost what little steam it had in the second half when it became clear this “novel” wasn’t going anywhere. Rather, the same ideas are explored but from a slightly different — but not vastly different — perspective.
While it seems like I loathed this novel, I really didn’t. It simply didn’t meet expectations based on marketing and early reviews. I’m impressed to see how much Taylor’s writing has improved since his debut, and how he’s not afraid to try complex, interconnected storytelling. Still, he needs to find the balance between ideas and action. Even to a literary fiction fan, this was a bore.
What wasn’t disappointing was the stellar narration by Kevin R. Free. He matched the detached and self-important style of the characters perfectly and made significant effort to differentiate between them with well-placed variances in pitch and inflection.
While the text itself wasn’t always engaging, it was of no fault to Free. For as prolific of a narrator as he is, this was my first time hearing one of his performances. I certainly hope it won’t be the last.
Rating (story): 3/5 stars
Rating (narration): 4/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: June 2 - June 4, 2023
Multi-tasking: Not recommended. It requires a lot of concentration to pick-up all the details in these non-linear stories.
