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A college campus in the midwest provides the setting for this expansive novel of sex, politics and self-discoveryThe stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when pain is both ubiquitous and mundane? The answer comes in bodily connection, but physical encounters may result merely in the transfer of pain.Taylor emerged aged 30 with his Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut Real Life. This was a painful, often funny, always dazzling autobiographical novel, with the narrator closely inside the head and body of its lonely Black, gay graduate student protagonist. Taylor revealed himself as brilliant at intense, awkward social comedy, and revelatory, unerotic sex scenes. The skill was in the delineation of moment-by-moment bodily life, charting tiny shifts between tenderness and violence and the hourly exhaustion of being in a disordered body. Unusually, Taylor was prepared to tell as well as to show, using his characters to think hard about his world. Continue reading...