Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor: book review
What Brandon Taylor sets out to do in this novel is incredibly ambitious. In what is generally close third person, he seeks to capture the entire expansiveness of life, the intimate thoughts and feelings of the entire world. He presents a detailed accounting of the total monotony of daily life. He makes it profound. He also completely belabors it. Both things can be true.
Taylor, a lover of the 19th century novel and sharp literary critic, wants to take a more expansive, ambitious view than the typical contemporary novel for his third outing, which centers on a painter who falls in love with a former priest and survives a sweltering New York summer as the world begins to re-open after lockdown. He is not afraid to meander. The digressions, whether about a random couple walking down the street or the qualities of classical music or painting technique, nearly consume the entire book. I love a digression. I love a microscopic look at the mundane. This book is entirely my thing. Still, I read about 30% of it in the fall before I realized I would never finish it before the Libby gods took it away, and when I checked it out recently from the library on a whim, I found the experience to be somewhat like wading through potato soup. Chunky, delicious, time consuming, oscillating between gummy and revelatory.
Because, here's the thing: the page-long digression every three pages has fallen out of style for a reason. It creates an immense density that doesn't achieve what the author likely hopes, and it increases the likelihood that the reader will stop reading. I'm a true believer in the books are art argument. I don't think books needs to be engineered to compete with the dopamine candy of smartphones. But there's a difference between presenting a mentally stimulating challenge and sprinkling pits of quicksand through your novel for no discernible reason. Reading Taylor's novel made me understand why my professor made me cut half the digressions out of the opening of my novel. While Taylor is a gifted prose stylist and his thinking on every page is fascinating, we do read books to be told a story, and that gets forgotten here too often for the narrative tension to be maintained. While I enjoyed every digression in and of itself, after 10 pages of the book, it gets tiring. Much like cake, good things become bad in too large of quantities.
I feel like this could've been offset, to some degree, by a slight shift in presentation. If Taylor had utilized more of a vignette style, with the longest asides getting their own chapter of sorts instead of stuck in the middle of a conversation you've forgotten the point of by the end, then there'd be the chance to enjoy his sharp observations about modern life and then get a chance to breath. Get condensed hits of the story and then be free to wander for a while. But the extremely long chapters with the extremely dense prose doesn't let the air in anywhere, and that's when I start to question the necessity of such a winding road in a quiet story.
All that said, everything Taylor attempts within the story he does well, balancing the romantic plot that pushes Wyeth to question his core beliefs, with the artistic plot that does the same thing in a different fashion, he derives a lot of interest out of a quiet set of circumstances. This is, famously, what Taylor does best. And he asks thought provoking questions about art making, about love, about how we form our identities and how the modern world encourages very little challenge once these identities are formed. I liked the friendships that bloom among his coworkers, the arguments that are quietly resolved, the small wins that are acknowledged as all life truly has to offer. It is an extremely realistic novel. It is a pointillist portrait of modern life, and I love that.
It did make me laugh how Taylor doesn't shy away from firmly setting the book in 2021, but he tries to, perhaps, elevate the feel of this through refusing most name brands. Instead, he creates oblique and often esoteric sounding descriptions to lead the reader back to references to Sally Rooney, Taylor Swift, and, most hilariously, LuLaRoe leggings.
I both enjoyed the book immensely and struggled to finish it. Somehow, it was a chore and a delight as I carved out big chunks of my day to make very little progress through the novel. A somewhat confounding reading experience.
Overall: 4
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