Sooner or later, Brandon Taylor is going to win a big prize. The Booker or the Pulitzer. The American author—a novelist, critic and Substack superstar—writes prose that is concise, precise and full of detailed observation. His work exudes the sense that he has lived through every scene, and that what we are reading is not fiction but real life.
Taylor made his name with works set in the Midwest in, and adjacent to, university campuses. He studied four years of a PhD in biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin—an experience that helped inspire Filthy Animals (2021) and especially the Booker-shortlisted Real Life (2020). He also has an MFA in creative writing from the renowned Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa—a setting integral to The Late Americans (2023). His new novel, Minor Black Figures, somewhat bucks this trend, stepping outside that Midwestern campus milieu to a New York setting.
I meet Taylor in a small office at the top of a brownstone building in Greenwich Village. New York is enduring its coldest winter for a generation, and Taylor wears a black beanie and a Yonex tennis pullover. Given his Substack blog is called Sweater Weather, I tell him I was expecting knitwear.
Taylor laughs. He is a tennis fanatic who is forgoing his usual practice routine this morning. Sitting behind a wooden desk, he apologises for the building’s 1830s staircase. His voice is jaunty and melodic.
Not yet 40, Taylor has become one of the most productive and influential literary authors in the US. In addition to his formal writing career, he teaches at New York University and is an acquiring editor for an independent publisher. His Substack blog includes essays on literature, culture and anything he finds interesting. In one of his most memorable posts, he describes summer in the shadeless city of Florence: “I now understand why Dante found it so easy to think so vividly and elaborately of Hell.”
Taylor was born in 1989, in rural Alabama. He grew up on a farm, and from the age of seven he helped slaughter chickens, deer, squirrels and rabbits. The farm was in a family compound, and he had to travel 20 miles to find someone who wasn’t a relation.
He would also pass long evenings sitting on the row of benches outside his grandparents’ house, listening to stories, insults and gossip. His family were great raconteurs, but most of them were illiterate. Taylor’s bookish education was thus atypical. As he told the Guardian in 2021, “While everybody else was reading The Cat in the Hat, I was reading my aunt’s nursing-home manuals and bodice-rippers.”
I suggest to Taylor that his early reading might have been formative. The Late Americans, for example, is laced with sex, and one of the main characters works in a hospice. “I don’t disagree,” he says. “I feel I wear that influence quite proudly. When I think about my work, it is shaped like romance novels with this incredible, almost dry, reportage.”
Taylor’s prose is often stark and immediate. For instance, in Real Life, he writes: “His father is dead—his father who did nothing for him. Dead, for weeks now. Wallace forgot it. He managed not forgiveness, but erasure.” But it can also be rich and lyrical. One of the best examples is the opening paragraph of “Mass”, a story from the collection Filthy Animals:
Aleksander Igorevich Shapovalov—Sasha to those who loved him most in the world and Alek to everyone else, including himself—stared at the radiographic scans presented to him by his doctor in the intimate corner examination room and tried to think of what he’d tell his mother.
Taylor has a somewhat Victorian idea of scene, and during our conversation he cites the influence of Henry James and Anton Chekhov. He cherishes setting and description, but allows for digressions and interiority. It’s a sensibility that sets him apart from many of his millennial peers. “A lot of contemporary writers do what I call ‘character vapour’,” Taylor says. “Thoughts spritz mysteriously into a room that is sparsely described. There isn’t an emphasis on external, quote-unquote, objective reality.”
Taylor’s characters think big thoughts and argue about weighty matters, but they are also earthy. They are gay, black biochemists from the rural South; artists who work in chicken plants; dancers who want to be bankers (and who moonlight in pornography). A typical Taylor character straddles worlds and inhabits liminal realities.
Taylor’s motifs—the complexities of class, racial representation and gay love—may be current, but he writes in a commanding tone that is out of fashion. Critics have suggested that his voice is indebted to James Baldwin. In fact, says Taylor, any similarity is due to a common influence—the King James Bible—which Taylor describes as “the language of poetry for many African Americans”.
Minor Black Figures, which came out in the UK in March, is his most capacious work to date. It takes place in the summer heat, when characters sweat walking upstairs and cereal boxes go soft from humidity. In a Substack post, Taylor called it “a novel about what happens when you spend all of a New York summer having sex with a hot Jesuit”. It describes the becoming of an artist and explores the possibilities of art—particularly as produced by black artists.
The protagonist, Wyeth, is a painter of modest renown who also works as an art restorer. He rents a fifth-floor walkup apartment painted in “landlord white” and watches films by Ingmar Bergman. At 31, his career has stalled. He is not as successful as his classmates from art school, who exhibit at fashionable galleries, produce segments on PBS television or teach at Harvard.
In particular, Wyeth is struggling with how to represent black people in his art. Bernard, a friend and a kind of mentor, describes Wyeth’s subjects as “hypothetical”, and his work as “sterile”. “They’re cut off, Bernard had said, from real black life as it happens in the real fucking world. You make thought experiments, not paintings.”
The turning point of Wyeth’s summer, perhaps his life, is meeting Keating—a blond man of the “Abercrombie & Fitch archetype” who radiates “weird Übermensch shit”. Keating is the aforementioned Jesuit, a seminarian whose vocation is “on a break”. Both characters face a crisis of doubt.
Keating becomes Wyeth’s lover and muse. Together with a book of John Singer Sargent sketches, he helps Wyeth rediscover his purpose. Wyeth’s subsequent portrait of Keating is controversial among his friends and colleagues, but it consummates his development as a painter.
“What was he painting?… A painting of a white man, but really, a painting of his own consciousness. It was a black painting. ‘I’m calling it Black Man,’ he said. Chloé whistled. Michel bugged his eyes. ‘Explain,’ he said. ‘Immediately.’ ‘Well. I feel like. It’s a black painting. Because I’m black. And I painted it.’”
I ask Taylor whether he agrees with Wyeth. “You know, it depends on the day of the week,” he says. “Is everything a black person does a black thing or is it just a thing?” He chuckles, and his smile turns puckish. “I almost called the book Black Man; and then I thought, no, I would get into so much trouble.”
It would have been a provocative title, but also a literary one. Just as The Late Americans has a Jamesian ring, Taylor’s alternative would have nodded towards another New York novel concerned with blackness and individual purpose, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. As it is, Minor Black Figures is a playful choice—one laden with cool irony, alluding to Wyeth’s artistic predicament.
Taylor has a knack for titles. I suggest that each one (Real Life, Filthy Animals, The Late Americans and now Minor Black Figures) refers not only to the specific novel or story collection, but to his whole oeuvre. “I think in systems,” he says. “I think in constellations and networks of relation and meaning. For me, each book is its own individual experience, but I’m always deeply in conversation with all the other things I have written.”
Minor Black Figures is a development in span and scope, but also tone. It’s funnier and lighter than its predecessors, both in terms of narrative voice and character. “Oh, it was so much fun,” Taylor enthuses. “I wanted to describe stuff because I had written two very severe books. I wanted to have an excuse to describe paintings, and to describe the city, and to write about music. And I also wanted to write about God. And to write about God, I’m going to stick a priest in, and I’m going to write about Bergman movies.”
Throughout, Taylor pokes fun. He pokes fun at the New York art scene, pokes fun at the guff of New York real estate, and pokes fun at New York tittletattle:
The MangoWave show was in a gallery that had once been a penthouse that had once been two lofts… People didn’t really come for the art. They came for the free wine… They came to pose with Washington Square Park at their backs… for the last opening before they all decamped to the Hamptons or upstate or to Paris… They also came to gossip and to see for themselves if the gallery was really in dire straits, if the owner really was in a throuple with a young Swiss and an older Italian who was not not a count.
Irony also helps Taylor explore more serious matters. When the narration begins, Wyeth’s best-known painting is of a dead black man. Because it went viral in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, viewers widely assumed it was a political comment. In fact, Wyeth’s inspiration was the fisherman from Bergman’s 1963 film Winter Light—a white Swede.
I note that Taylor’s novels buck the publishing trend of capitalising the word “black”. When I ask why, his smile again turns puckish. “You know, when they started capitalising B, we were in the middle of copy editing The Late Americans. This is after much of the intense social reckoning and reimagining of the early 2020s, and it was like the publisher had caught le wokisme. The copy editor suggested that we capitalise B for black. And I was just like, in what world? No way, no way. It just feels cringe to me. It feels cringe and insane to capitalise the B in black because I don’t live my life as a capital-B black person. I think that there are occasions to capitalise the B—for example, when one is talking about political ideology—but because so much of my work is centred on the mundane, quotidian experience, I just can’t… It would feel like I was slapping [the character] in a dashiki. So I told them: we won’t be doing that.”
Given his critical and public acclaim, particularly in the United States, you would suspect that Taylor has the bargaining power to do what he wants. His next novel will be about tennis—an unusual subject for literary fiction, even accounting for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which Taylor describes as “tennis-related, and not really a tennis novel”.
Taylor’s inspiration comes from “the sociological experiment on display” in Central Park, where he would take morning lessons surrounded by white women. From their age, skill level, dress and how they interacted with the coaches, Taylor says he could always tell “who was a second wife and who was a first”.
It’s typical of the Taylor I’ve met this morning—a perceptive and delightful conversationalist, the scion of a family of gossips and raconteurs. When I laughinly request evidence, he responds: “Oh, I’m not conjecturing.” Taylor confirmed his instincts when he spoke to the women after practice.
“I felt like an interloper,” he says. “But I couldn’t stop watching.”
