Like Taylor’s two previous books, The Late Americans involves the intertwined lives of young people, mostly queer men, on a Midwestern college campus. In creating that kaleidoscopic, panoramic view, it succeeds - but it sometimes falters on the details. Part of the project of this novel is to turn the readers into God, showing us the automated movements of Taylor’s late American characters as they glide precisely along their clockwork tracks, worrying about money and having sex and making art. Everyone else he knows is in the dollhouse too, moving about their lives under God’s judging stare, “like little automatons in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Early on in Brandon Taylor’s elegant and restrained new novel The Late Americans, a poet named Seamus imagines the world to be a kind of diorama or dollhouse with “some enormous and indifferent God” peering down at him.
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