Minor Black Figures
Brandon Taylor is an extraordinary writer, mesmerizing and profound. This has something to do with his voice and also the quality of his mind. He’s very contemporary and yet there’s something very classical in his writing style and themes.
On the surface the novel tells the story of a young black painter trying to find his way back to his art who meets and hooks up with a white ex-seminarian who is struggling with a different loss of faith. The story takes place over the course of a summer. Wyeth (this choice of name, recalling Andrew Wyeth, is no accident) lives alone but shares a studio space with several others. Wyeth has jobs both at a gallery and for an art restorer, so the story centers on the art world and is set primarily in Manhattan. The characters are diverse in terms of gender, race, and sexual identity; Wyeth is gay and is also wrestling with being his authentic self with others as well as with the notion of “black subjectivity.”
None of that tells you about the quality of the book. It moves briskly but with little if any plot. There are no conventional stakes, although there are a few questions that propel the action: whether Wyeth will or won’t end up in a committed relationship and, near the end of the book, whether he will/won’t accept an offer to have a piece in a group show of artists whose work he despises. Mostly the book is full of shimmering details – I can’t think of a book that gave me the feel of being in Manhattan the way this one does. It’s also steeped in philosophical questions and tart dialogue, and the way he describes the minutia of art restoration and of the act of painting is breathtaking.
And speaking of details, as a writer, I absolutely loved a scene where Wyeth meets a friend at Kinokuniya, a wonderful Japanese bookstore I have frequented (thank you, Jane). There are pages of description, of the ledger-style notebooks Wyeth’s friend favors, a particular chalk that is “buttery smooth and resistant to breaking,” the qualities of certain papers, and whole paragraphs devoted to a discussion of my favorite pencils, Blackwing. I’m sure all writers, as well as artists, are fetishistic about pens, paper, and notebooks and will recognize themselves in this scene.
There’s something very Jamesian in Taylor’s writing, especially the character interiority and a focus on social interactions and the power dynamics in closed social circles. I should also mention that there is a lot of very graphic, honest, and direct gay sex. I found something of Proust in Taylor as well, in the way he stretches time and is always thinking thinking thinking.
Brandon Taylor deserves a wide audience. I’m betting he’s going to get one.