Book Review: "The Late Americans" by Brandon Taylor

“This wasn’t poetry. This was the aping of poetry in pursuit of validation. This was another kind of poetry theatric: If you just said enough names, people assumed you knew what you were talking about and tended to attribute the vagueness of the reference to their own ignorance.”

- The Late Americans by Brandon Taylor

I heard a lot about "The Late Americans" by Brandon Taylor before buying it, and the reviews were a mixed bag. Some people praised it as a great book, while others claimed it was one of the worst things they had ever read. After watching it hover around the Kindle store for a while, it finally came down in price to something more tolerable for my budget. The book is supposed to have some enduring charm, often being touted as one of the better books of the last five years. Whether it lives up to that hype is a whole different question. Let's break down the book and see what’s really going on here.

"The Late Americans" follows a diverse group of young adults in Iowa City, each dealing with their own personal and professional struggles. The main characters, including artists, dancers, writers, and other creatives, navigate themes of ambition, identity, love, and societal expectations. Their lives intersect in various meaningful ways, providing a tapestry of contemporary young adulthood.

Through individual stories, the novel delves into the aspirations, insecurities, and complex relationships of these characters. They grapple with issues of class, race, and sexuality, painting a vivid portrait of a generation facing the pressures of modern life while searching for meaning.

In essence, "The Late Americans" is a nuanced, character-driven narrative that captures the angst, hope, and complexity of young adults today. Whether it’s one of the best books of recent years or just another novel with some buzz, it certainly provides a lot to unpack.

First of all, no matter how compelling the overall storyline seems, there are scenes that I feel could have been written better by the author. These include the female perspectives as I didn't feel them to be realistic of the female experience. If I've said it once, I've said it a million times - men should not write in the perspective of a woman because it simply doesn't work. But I think there was something a bit worse than that for me.

This one worse thing were the poetry classes. Now I have been to these creative writing spaces and can I start by saying that they are nothing like the creative writing spaces that are written here. What Brandon Taylor has done is reduced them down to stereotypes whereas, in these actual spaces there are no stereotypes. The whole point is experimentation and invidivualisation and so, nobody really becomes a stereotype of anything. He also uses unnecessarily artsy language which automatically locks out the reader who has not been in these spaces and lets them produce an inaccurate view of them. The fact that this is the very first page of the novel also means that it doesn't really invite the reader into the book. It feels very unwelcoming and this writer probably needs to work on that.

I don't want to give away too much of the storyline because it would give things away that I would not like to. What I can say is that there is too much of one thing in this book: badly written sexual contact scenes. I'm not a prude but I do think that both books and movies can leave this out because of the fact that there is no need for it. We get it, you're trying to be realistic. So was Virginia Woolf, the Queen of Realism, and there was not a single sexual contact scene in her books. Everything is about implication.

All in all, I found this book to be way more overhyped in the positive reviews than I initially thought it would be. I think you should probably read it for yourself to gage what you think, but I feel that there are too many negatives to recommend it from my perspective of likeability. I do however, hope you find something in the book I could not find. It simply did not do it for me.