March 27, 2023
Taylor (Filthy Animals) offers a perceptive chronicle of graduate students and their townie lovers in Iowa City. Seamus, a white poet in the MFA program, is embittered, having been told by his classmates and professor that his poems aren’t relevant to the contemporary discourse. After a rough sexual encounter with Bert, an older man whose father is a patient in the hospice where Seamus works as a cook, Seamus throws his energy into a new poem. There’s also Fyodor and Timo, two Black men in an on-again/off-again relationship, their tensions sparked by Fyodor’s resentment of Timo’s comfortable middle-class origins, which put him on a path to study math and music, and by vegetarian Timo’s outrage at Fyodor for working in a meatpacking plant. Ivan and Goran, another couple, fight about not having sex anymore, then sleep with other people instead. The various episodes don’t quite cohere, but Taylor’s characters come to life as they face unbridgeable gaps and their frustrations mount. Though economic privilege drives a wedge in many of the characters’ relationships, their sexual desires and shared uncertainty about the future keep them tumbling along together through scenes cut with razor-sharp observations (here’s Timo, asked what kind of math he studies: “A pointless grasp at specificity, leading nowhere in particular”). With verve and wit, Taylor pulls off something like Sally Rooney for the Midwest. (May)Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the race of one of the characters.

April 1, 2023
Taylor's second novel reads more like his interconnected story collection Filthy Animals (2021) than his debut, Real Life (2020), though both are campus tales centered on graduate students. In Iowa City, there are dancers who frequent the poet bar, poets dismissed early from seminar, art students whose day jobs label them outsiders, and those who will trade art for the security of med school or banking. Among the large cast, students and townies who come and go, sometimes in deep focus and other times in side roles, is Ivan, who dabbles in making porn, and his boyfriend, Goran, who doesn't know how to feel about it. There's poet Seamus, dancer Noah, and landlord Bert, whose lit-fuse presence bookends the novel as he becomes a menacing, sort-of lover to them both. Taylor writes feelings and physical interactions with a kind of sixth sense, creating scenes readers will visualize with ease. At the beginning and ending of things and in confronting gradations of sex, power, and class, ambivalence pervades. Lovers of character studies and fine writing will enjoy getting lost in this.

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April 21, 2023

On its surface, Taylor's sophomore novel opts for a similar milieu to that of his breakout 2020 debut Real Life--specifically, major Midwestern university graduate programs. But it's a more expansive affair, a constellation novel with a roster of interconnected characters navigating the emotional, social, and intellectual spectrums of modern living. There's also a compelling dissonance here: main characters indeed register as apt reflections of the book's title--Gen Zers navigating a petty, increasingly surreal late capitalist United States within the confines of academia (it's no accident that these young folks are poets, painters, musicians, and dancers)--but Taylor lends the novel a texture that's more classical than contemporary (even down to giving his subjects names like Fyodor and Ivan and Seamus). It's a savvy maneuver that places these people and their artistic pursuits within a literary lineage, reshaping their relationships and struggles. The problem then, and where the book comes up short of Real Life, is in tipping too frequently into mere misery business. Near the novel's end, one character considers what happiness is to him: "Pushing one another, pulling one another, falling apart, coming together, kissing, hugging, laughing." This is a fair enough synopsis for the novel, but little of the joy it implies consistently registers. VERDICT Taylor again proves himself to be a master of creating recognizable, fallible humans, but the novel's unvaried tonal character becomes wearisome and smothers too many of its virtues of canny observation.--Luke Gorham

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May 15, 2023
A Booker Prize-shortlisted author chronicles the lives of graduate students at a Midwestern university. There's a perverse energy to writing workshops. The ostensible goal is for writers to help each other improve their writing by critiquing it, but what everybody in the room--aside, maybe, from the presiding genius--wants is affirmation. Taylor captures this tension wonderfully in the opening scenes of his new novel. The central figure here is Seamus, a poet who not only refuses to praise "personal history transmuted into a system of vague gestures toward greater works," but also dares to reveal his honest evaluation of another poet's work. In addition to writing poetry, Seamus cooks for hospice patients. He's an interesting character, and even readers who think he's a jerk--an easily defended assessment--are almost certainly going to care about what he does and what happens to him. The opening chapter--Seamus' story--could stand alone as a piece of short fiction, but the same is not true of what follows. In the next chapter, Taylor follows Fyodor and begins to introduce more characters than a reader can reasonably be expected to get invested in or even remember. The characters begin to lose specificity. Noah is a dancer, as is Fatima. Ivan was a dancer, but now he's studying finance and making money via something that looks like OnlyFans. Fyodor works in a slaughterhouse, and his partner is a vegetarian. But Taylor only intermittently gives these characters and their situations the same attention he gave Seamus, and there are characters swirling around the periphery who barely register but require keeping track of. Complicated and unhappy relationships and sex that seems more like a reflex than a choice are the main motifs throughout much of the novel. Some readers might see the introduction of a new point-of-view character on Page 231 as a fresh start. Other readers might just give up. Lots of characters. Not a lot of depth.

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