A study of isolation: The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor, reviewed

The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor’s second novel, follows the lives of a group of friends living in Iowa City over the span of a year. Early on, Seamus, a poet completing his master’s degree, imagines an ‘indifferent God… squinting at them as they went about their lives on the circuits like little automata in an exhibit called The Late Americans’, and this is a fine description of the novel. Each character is the focus of a chapter, and we watch as Seamus, Fyodor, Ivan, Timo, Noah, Bea, Fatima and Daw’s lives overlap, in bars, seminar rooms and dance studios, while they negotiate their place in a world determined by their race, class and wealth.

‘Late’ means at least two things for these Americans: they have to exist within the realities of late capitalism, but they are also too late to enjoy the security of mid-century American abundance and must make do with a precarious existence where work and relationships are hard to come by. Seamus, Noah and Fatima, all Masters of Fine Arts students, need jobs to live. They labour on building sites and in kitchens and coffee shops in temporary positions, but the careers they are working towards are no more secure (‘Dance isn’t how you build a life,’ Fatima’s parents tell her). Money tempts Ivan, a former dancer, now an MBA student (he aspires to be ‘part of that rarefied class that got to skim the money from the money’), into making adult content to earn enough to move to New York. It’s an alluring choice, and Noah tells him that his life ‘is going to be beautiful’ and more stable than Noah’s own will be as a member of a dance company. Relationships are also a struggle. Sex is plentiful but casual; deeper partnerships are elusive. Fyodor and Timo’s founders when class and wealth get in the way.