At its core The Late Americans is an unflinchingly honest account of personhood and its many tribulations.

We are introduced to a host of characters, each connected by a proclivity for the arts, and an ostensible aversion to stability. With each new perspective, previous judgements shift; Characters who once seemed indefensible evoke pity, and characters you have grown to love spark outrage.

Brandon Taylor doesn’t write characters, he writes people. Flawed, capricious, vulnerable people. People who we all know, within ourselves and in those around us. His writing is deliberate yet achingly human - reminiscent of Douglas Stuart and Hanya Yanagihara.

As always with novels like these, my singular difficulty with this book is that I wish there were more of it. While Taylor did an incredible job of creating numerous characters with depth and complexity, I didn’t have time to form a true attachment to any of them. While some characters stood out to me, others faded into the background. And though not everybody can be the main character (in this case there are none) I found myself aching for something to hold on to.

But perhaps that’s the point.

The Late Americans is very well written but it wasn't for me, I found the characters and their lives unrelatable and didn't warm to them. I made myself read over half the book but gave up as I wasn't enjoying it and life is too short to waste on books you don't enjoy!!

Looking at other reviews I am in the minority so I would say give it a go.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for allowing me to read The Late Americans.

I absolutely loved this book. I’m not familiar with the work of Brandon Taylor, but based on this reading, I’ll be looking for more. His writing is powerful and immersive and I was totally beguiled by each of the characters in this tale.

It’s the story of a number of individuals whose lives intersect in their final year at University in Iowa. The narrative is in chapters which are the viewpoint of each character and read almost like a novella, complete with backstories fir the characters and their challenges and ideals. It’s a construction which works well and the threads are maintained and developed as the story progresses. This feels like the story of real people; plausible characters who are engaging and I found this a powerful page turner.

This is a hard one to review! I really wanted to read this book, however, as a download it was a nightmare and impossible to read! Throughout the text there were:
Words that were randomly hyphenated
Missing words in the middle of sentences
and most annoying of all - "9781787334434_LateAmericans.indd 255 26/08/22 3"34pm" after every few lines of text.
After a while it all became dreadfully annoying and unbearable to read so I accepted defeat and gave up! However, as a lecturer myself, I enjoyed examining the lives of the university students and their relationships and as such, I will probably continue reading it if a more readable version becomes available.
As such, this rating is as a result of an unreadable book, rather than the novel itself, which I cannot rate because I have been unable to read it.

I couldn't make it through this. Having loved the author's first novel, this had none of the power of language. It felt disconnected and like it was trying to be clever.

I thought this one was proving difficult due to the random incorrectly hyphenated words scattered about the #netgalley download, as well as the off-putting titles, appearing somewhere on every page. (For example - I kept reading re-sent as though someone had sent something again, but it's actually resent, as in to be bitter) It really threw the flow of the book.

However on reading other reviews I realised that the book itself is tough to get through; it‘s rather pretentiously self-conscious so I‘m giving up.

1.5

From skimming a few reviews I see I fall into the minority camp of really not liking this book.

For me it was a loose collection of ramblings interspersed with casual violence and a lot of oral sex. I got very bored with the interminable references to oral sex - it reminded me very much of Miriam Margolyes' autobiography which I also disliked.

So in the notes for this book I've scribbled "exhaustingly introspective", "characters the same so I muddle them up", "headache" and then "lorem ipsum" alongside "pretentious and derivative". The last two are used in the book itself but its how I'd sum it up - placeholder gibberish until the real dialogue gets put in and the pretentious comment is one used by one of the dancers (or poets) about someone else's work.

Frankly I did not like very much at all about this. I see that Brandon Taylor has a large following. I won't be one of them. The whole thing gave me multiple tension headaches, took me 10 days to read and only the last ten percent was somewhat interesting.

I don't mind a book that goes nowhere but the writing has to be better than this for me.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC but Late Americans was simply not for me.

Look, Brandon Taylor is one of my favourite writers. His work feeds this hunger inside my brain that very few things can touch. So I am beyond biased when I say that this book is wonderful. So wonderful that I gratefully zoomed in on the ARC pdf for every page and only sighed to myself like three times max.

Taylor’s work on a sentence level is so specific and thoughtful; I get so much pleasure from sitting with a phrase for a bit and just enjoying it. I like the way he writes interiority – close and raw, but also kept at a slight remove – there is a sharp coldness to his characters. I’ve said this before, but I love how I can see every one of his scenes as beautiful little paintings.

In The Late Americans, money and the body are both seen as something animal, alive and unpredictable. All of the characters’ relationships are impacted by the tension created by this unpredictability – ‘Goran didn’t need to think about the future because the future held no mystery for him, except in aesthetic terms. But Ivan couldn’t live on aesthetics.’ All they can do is be sad and have sex about it. I really like how Taylor just writes his characters as full people, bad and good. Their lives go up and down, but the bad things that happen to them don’t feel like divine moral punishment. They just are and we have to decide how we feel about it.

Just because I loved it doesn’t mean I think it’s a perfect work. I wanted more of some characters and less of others – more Seamus for example. Bea’s section was a perfect little gem, but I would’ve liked her to be introduced earlier, create more cohesion with the rest. I guess there’s an argument to be made about how they’re all alone with their worries and anxieties and her story reflects that but but! And yes, at times, it did feel like maybe there were too many characters in the main group.

But then you have sentences like ‘He stiffened under her touch, startled like an animal, and she could feel the quivering, beating alive thing inside of him. She could feel it, the part of him that was not human but real and alive.’ and all is forgiven.

The ending left me gasping a bit, the mirroring, the kindness. Another banger from Brandon Taylor.

Thank you SO MUCH to Netgalley and Jonathan Cape for providing the free ARC. [I cried a bit when I got approved]

An intense pot-boiler set mainly in and around a college campus in Iowa City, a group of intimates mainly dancers and poets share close relationships, which I guess is them is trying to find their way through life at that age between adolescent and adult.
Interesting characters, well written, but for me the characters were all too similar, and sex was too high on the agenda, and too intensely described. Many people will thoroughly enjoy this book, however.
My thanks to the publisher for an advanced copy for honest review.

An interlinking collection of stories, 'The Late Americans' is beautifully evocative - conjuring emotion in just a few words, Brandon Taylor is a gorgeous poet of a writer - this is his latest and best work

Well written and generally enjoyable stories relating to relationships in a homosexual community. Very interesting perspective on porn and how Ivan uses it to redress the power balance financially, and to gain independence, and also to work through his feelings.

There is some repetition, especially into power balance in relationships but I was invested in the characters especially Seamus

NO SPOILERS
I have read Brandon Taylor’s previous two books. Real Life (Booker Prize short listed) and Filthy Animals, and I loved them both. And I love The Late Americans, too. There’s a lot of small trivial detail of people’s every-day lives in this book but Taylor’s astute, insightful and observant writing had me right in there, feeling a part of the whole.

The characters have however, reached a turning point and Taylor’s portrayal of the individual and collective emotions surrounding this are fascinating. Gossipy, scandalous, frivolous, petty, grand, friendships fragile and robust…it’s all here. He writes with empathy and his skill as a wordsmith makes the reader feel it, too. His understanding of the human condition has me nodding gently in agreement on every page and his genius at conveying this is superb.

Oh, and I have to add Taylor’s social media accounts are the most entertaining on all platforms.

Brandon Taylor's second novel involves a group of young friends and lovers living in Iowa City - mostly graduate students, mostly studying arts courses (poetry, music, dance), mostly gay men though a couple of female characters become more prominent towards the end of the novel. Different chapters follow different characters' perspectives which start to coalesce as the novel progresses. Taylor depicts these characters' hopes and the ways in which these are frustrated, and traces the contours of the unstable and volatile relationships they form. Violence in its many forms is never far away in this novel - even, and perhaps especially during moments of intimacy.

As with Taylor's first novel, 'Real Life', there is an exceptional clarity and insight to Taylor's writing. He offers a particularly nuanced dissection of the ways different types of privilege intersect, especially race, gender and class, and the ways that these can be weaponised. Characters are rarely able to empathise with the forms of disadvantage faced by others, and these tensions drive much of the conflict in the novel. I was particularly struck by Taylor's exploration of money and class. Some of the best passages in the novel explore the experiences of students who need to supplement their income by working jobs, for instance in a hospice kitchens or a beef plant, and thus straddle two worlds. Another dividing line is between those who have continue to pursue their artistic ambitions, and those who have relinquished them - through choice or otherwise.

As a novel, this may well be more ambitious and impressive than 'Real Life' due to the plurality of perspectives explored. However, as a reader I found it slightly less compelling, perhaps for the same reason. There were slightly too many characters to hold clearly in my head, and in spite of the many differences between their experiences, I struggled to keep track of their different motivations and relationships with each other. None of the character in this novel engaged me as fully as Wallace in 'Real Life' whose story has stayed with me three years after reading it.

Nonetheless, this is a powerful and timely novel which speaks to many of the anxieties of Generation Z. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

I will read literally anything Brandon Taylor writes. Beautiful, engaging prose, characters to really care about, and I honestly envy anyone reading his work for the first time.

Thank you Netgalley and the publishers for the review copy of this book. I really enjoyed this author's previous novel Real Life, however I found The Late Americans to be very heavy, hard to follow, and not very engaging. It reads like a collection of short stories rather than a novel, and although the writing is beautiful it just didn't grip me. But I know lots of people will adore this book.

As someone with experience of postgraduate academic circles, to me Taylor is totally on the money with how it can feel like what you’re doing there is vital and interesting, while also having the knowledge that it is in no way useful to life outside. I liked the structure of The Late Americans too, coming across as a bit like interlinked short stories where the subject characters, all involved in the University of Iowa, were sometimes well-known to each other and then occasionally just a loose acquaintance. The close third person narration supports this, zooming in on the thoughts and feelings of various people while keeping them distant too.

"The Late Americans" for me read like a collection of short stories about a group of interconnected people. The threads connecting the whole were somewhat weak however. Some of the characters were great, but some of the character stories seemed pointless, or no more than token inclusions at best. Despite this, it is easy to tell, even from this disappointing set, how good a writer Brandon Taylor can be and why he has received so much acclaim. Some of his use of language is jarring but unforgettable. Whilst this was the first Brandon Taylor book I had read, I would still like to read some of his earlier works. Special thank you to Random House UK Vintage and NetGalley for a no obligation advance review copy.

I would struggle to be able to review this book due to issues with the file/download. The issues stopped the flow of the book. The issues are:
- Missing words in the middle of sentences
- Stop/start sentences on different lines
- No clear definition of chapters.
- Red text throughout
- "9781787334434_LateAmericans.indd 255 26/08/22 3"34pm" throughout the text

I’m not sure if it was a file/download issue but there were lots of gaps and stops/starts which really ruined the flow. I would love the chance to read a better version as the description of the book appeals to me. I would be more than happy to re-read the book with a better file or as a physical book as the book topic and genre are of interest to me. If you would like me to re-review please feel free to contact me at thesecretbookreview@gmail.com or via social media The_secret_bookreview (Instagram) or Secret_bookblog (Twitter). Thank you.

In his latest novel Taylor is telling the story of a disparate group of Americans black and white, queer and straight young people. They are all at crossroads and trying to untangle their complex and complicated lives. Time sadly is not on their side. It is essentially a character driven novel. They are in the same social circle and Taylor is recounting their lives and friendships.

I found the beginning of Taylors novel rather disjointed. I struggled to engage and nearly gave up reading it. However, I soon got my head round the busyness of the story. I ended up being so engrossed in the tale or should I say tales that I could not put it down. The novel is impressively cohesive despite being a series of stories and backstories of the protagonists. He intertwines their stories with such brilliance, their feelings of unimportance, of desiring to be noticed and everything else going on in their lives. Gradually the tapestry of their lives unfolds to reveal a vulnerable group of young folk battling the vicissitudes of life. Apart from the beginning I found it immersive, and thought provoking. Once it drew me in I was glued to the book and the pages couldn’t turn fast enough.

Unsurprisingly, a sophisticated beautiful piece of work from a previous Booker short listed author. Kudos to Taylor he may well have done it again.

Just as heavy as Brandon Taylor can get and I absolutely loved it! For me, it's his best book yet. Didn't need the sex scenes though.