“‘The Late Americans’ Is Brandon Taylor’s Kaleidoscopic Look at Life in a Midwest City” - shondaland

Published: May 23, 2023

The acclaimed author discusses the democratization of art, writing a campus novel that looks beyond the students, and more.

Not only did Brandon Taylor’s new novel, The Late Americans, initially not make it out of the editing process, it also nearly ended his career as a writer. Taylor wrote the novel in about six months, sold it, and spent a year trying to get it into a shape he liked. When he couldn’t, Taylor quit writing “coldish turkey” and took up film photography. “I’d always wanted to be a visual artist,” he says over a recent phone call. “But I never pursued it because my brother was an art prodigy, and I had a whole complex about it.” So, on May 31, the night before his birthday, Taylor decided he would drop the book and check the thrift store for a camera the next day. The secondhand film camera they had in stock was all he needed to throw his creative energy in a completely different direction. “It really did feel like I was never going to write again because I wasn’t going to be able to finish this book,” he says. “And I felt like if I couldn’t finish the book, I was never going to finish another book.” Taylor immersed himself in this new creative practice, shooting six or seven rolls of film a day, and a move to New York only made it easier to get his film developed. “I was like, if I never write again, it’s okay. Because I can still express myself.”

One problem with the book was that it didn’t feel like the kind of novel Taylor likes to read. The Late Americans falls right in between a novel and a short story collection, enough so that Taylor wasn’t sure what it was until his editor declared it a novel. “I have very, very rigid feelings about what a novel is,” he says. “To me, a capital-N novel is like Henry James or Edith Wharton, a very rigid 19th century Anglophone.” Taylor’s loyalty to 19th century novels generated the title The Late Americans (a nod to Henry James’ The American) and nearly derailed his revisions. “I spent a year trying to rework the book to feel more like a Jamesian novel, and it ruined my life,” Taylor jokes. When I ask if it’s “late” Americans as in dead, tardy, or the current stage of capitalism, he says it’s “all of the above.”

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