Under Laboratory Conditions
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Minor Black Figures, Brandon Taylor, Jonathan Cape, 2026, 400 pages, £18.99
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In a memorial essay for George Eliot published in The Atlantic in May 1885, Henry James couldn’t resist one last pop at the great novelist. Passing judgement on Eliot’s fourth novel, Romola, a rather tortuous historical novel set in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, James wrote: ‘It is overladen with learning, it smells of the lamp, it tastes just perceptibly of pedantry.’ In other words, Eliot had spent too many late nights reading up on her subject, looking for details of Florentine history, geography, idiom and fact. Eliot’s attempt to portray a whole way of life had resulted, for James, in an excessively turgid book: too much literary realism, not enough real life.
There is something of Brandon Taylor in that line from James. Not only is Taylor an attentive reader of James’s fiction – he contributed the foreword to the 2022 ‘Penguin Vitae’ edition of The Portrait of a Lady, and his own 2023 novel, The Late Americans, has a distinctly Jamesian title – but he has also written his fair share of scathing reviews. Perhaps the best known of these to date was his excoriating takedown of Rachel Kushner’s novel Creation Lake, published in the London Review of Books in September 2024, in which Taylor wrote: ‘Creation Lake is a sloppy book whose careless construction and totalising cynicism come to feel downright hostile. As I read, I kept wondering, why did you even write this?’ (And that was just the opening paragraph.) The next month, in a review of Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo for Bookforum, Taylor made the rather nasal argument that Rooney’s four novels ‘demonstrate a writer of virtuosic gifts but minor technical proficiency’. While undoubtedly catty (who else would argue, entirely seriously, that ‘there is something of a student’s exercise’ about Intermezzo?), Taylor’s judgements are marked by close reading and detailed commentary. Intermezzo is, for Taylor, a flawed novel because of its grammar: Rooney’s narrator uses the ‘present progressive’ tense (that is, ‘he is walking’) rather than the ‘simple present’ tense (‘he walks’), and this has, Taylor explains, an ‘anaesthetizing’ effect because present participle verbs (ending ‘-ing’) ‘sap energy from the line of action’. Taylor has never really stepped outside of the seminar room (he is a graduate of the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop), and consequently his takedowns are as educative as they are entertaining.
As a critic, Taylor knows himself, and his arguments are bolstered by his certainty. This is a virtue in a reviewer, but it can make for a tedious novelist. We see as much in Real Life, Taylor’s Booker-shortlisted debut, which appeared in 2020. Narrated in the close third person, we follow Wallace, a queer, black student on a biochemistry PhD programme at a midwestern university. Over the course of a difficult summer, Wallace comes to terms with his father’s death, begins a flawed and brutal relationship with an apparently straight friend and reconsiders his career as a scientist after one of his labmates sabotages an experiment. Until 2016, Taylor was himself a graduate biochemist at a midwestern college, and there is, we assume, something of his own experience in Wallace’s. The novel is at times beautifully moving, and Taylor succeeds in his careful treatment of ‘difficult’ subjects like race and childhood trauma. But, as with Taylor’s reading of Intermezzo, Real Life is undermined by the grammar of its narration. Both Wallace and the third-person narrator favour the ‘simple present’ (for instance ‘Wallace feels’ or ‘he says’), and while this can be used, as Taylor put it in his piece on Rooney, to put the character ‘directly on the line of action’, the simple present has a tendency to blandly universalise, as when Wallace says ‘There are no bad people … People do bad things. But after a while they’re just people again’, or when the narrator describes Wallace’s thought ‘that the capacity to do something is not the same as the mandate to do it’. This is the gnomic present tense, the same tense used for scientific fact: ‘Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.’ ‘Sunlight takes eight minutes to reach the Earth.’ There is something deeply irritating about it: it is the language of aphorism, prescriptive rather than descriptive, stating not only that ‘This is the case’ but implying also that ‘This has always been the case’ and ‘This will go on being the case’. As a result, Real Life is overladen with certainty. It smells of the lab.
‘Real Life’ could well have been the title of Taylor’s new novel, Minor Black Figures, his most absorbing and intelligent work to date. Set in New York ‘two years post-COVID’ and again narrated in the close third person, the plot is centred on a queer love affair between the protagonist Wyeth, a black painter, and Keating, a white former Jesuit who leaves the priesthood after suffering a crisis of faith during the coronavirus pandemic. ‘I’m so angry,’ he tells Wyeth: ‘At the randomness of it all.’ Around the time of their first meeting, Wyeth is having his own crisis, albeit a creative one. He works part-time in a gallery and part-time for an art restorer, and lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment in a ‘walk-up’ (a building with no elevator) on the Upper East Side. The apartment itself is painted ‘landlord white’, the lobby of the building smells ‘like boiling cabbage’ and the notices plastered all over the hallway give it ‘a sense of Soviet disrepair’. As a painter, Wyeth’s project is to take ‘scenes from movies that only cinephiles could spot’, like Éric Rohmer’s Conte de printemps, and then add in imaginary black people. One of these pictures, based on a still from Ingmar Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna but with the white Lutheran pastor made racially ambiguous, went viral during the pandemic, that time when ‘it felt like the cops had total license to murder black people’. Among ‘the deluge of images coming out of the Black Lives Matter protests and the horrifying footage of the spectacle of black suffering that proliferated across platforms’, Wyeth’s painting was overinterpreted by its viewers, who looked at the picture in the light of history: ‘people read into it a theme about resistance, a theme about hope, a theme about the weariness of the spirit, and more.’ Wyeth sold that painting and no others, ‘afraid more people would think that he was cashing in on black suffering for financial reward’, and by the time the novel begins he has come to question both ‘his habit of quotation with blackness’ and the relation of his work to history. Wyeth knows that ‘his work disappointed people because there was never, some said, quite enough life in it’, and his ambition at the start of the novel is ‘to paint some real stuff for once, stuff about real people, real life’.
Wyeth’s creative difficulties in engaging with history and blackness are exacerbated by the success of MangoWave, ‘a collective of careerist young painters whose mission was to explore the Southeast Asian diasporic idiom’. This is Taylor at his most satirical and his treatment of these ‘diasporic grifters’ is enjoyably bitchy. At work, Wyeth reads an Artforum piece on MangoWave’s latest show, which ‘noted that each of them had grown up comfortably upper-middle class’; in response, the members of the collective ‘were quick to point out that this did not erase the pain of exile and sometimes created complicated feelings of guilt that were themselves another form of exile’. The show itself, titled ‘pour les intimes’, is both mundane and risible: nine paintings depicting ‘life scenes and still lifes of modern objects, everything suffused with an aura of gentle melancholy and playful eroticism’. Wyeth recognises the table in one of the pictures as belonging to ‘a certain gallerist who made passes at attractive black men and threw large parties at which he spent quite a lot of time telling people how much that table had cost’. He realises that the ‘governing subtext’ of ‘pour les intimes’ is that the show is designed to function like a close friends list on Instagram, accessible only to ‘a specialized and smaller public’, the titular ‘intimes’. It was in this way that MangoWave were simply ‘turning the game of social capital into paintings’, albeit ‘doing it with brown people and calling it radical’. A review of the show in the Times comments on the ‘insularity’ of MangoWave’s ‘idiom, the opacity of its intent’: ‘It seemed a show tuned to some high-frequency irony accessible only to certain blocks of downtown Manhattan and bits of Brooklyn.’ (That piece is then met with ‘the usual accusations of racism, colonialism, homophobia. Accusations of Western propaganda and a description of all of American art as being a CIA operation.’)
Towards the end of the book, Wyeth declines an invitation to hang his work at MangoWave’s next show. Rather than produce a wry little image for ‘les intimes’, Wyeth sets out to paint a portrait of Keating that displays ‘the insinuation of a whole life. But not only that. A whole way of life. A system of living organized and deployed within the vaster social context.’ Not simply a nudge and a wink to an audience of peers, but a ‘glimpse of a life that conjured a world because it spoke of all that world contained’. If this is Taylor’s own ambition for Minor Black Figures, then he has not quite accomplished it. The ‘vaster social context’ of coronavirus, Black Lives Matter, Roe vs. Wade and the civil unrest of the early 2020s is described, but described alone. The close third-person narrator stays wedded to Wyeth throughout, so we have little sense of any character conflict beyond what is said in dialogue (or what Wyeth thinks about that dialogue after the fact). When, midway through the book, the principal characters of the novel watch Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles in their studio, who is to say what’s happening outside? Who, if anyone, shouts in the street? When, sat by a duck pond in Central Park, Wyeth and Keating share a brief exchange of views about Roe vs. Wade, it remains just that: a brief exchange of views. The fact that their views are entirely oppositional leads to no conflict whatsoever, the dialectic resolved on the spot. History in Minor Black Figures is not so much a ‘vaster social context’ than something to be looked at, discussed and then turned away from. Like a painting, or a petri dish.
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Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly.
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