I have been eagerly awaiting this new novel by Brandon Taylor in part because I love reading his literary criticism. I haven’t learned much about being a generous, yet critical reader from Taylor and I often find myself agreeing with his broader takes on the state of literature. This book is about Wyeth, a Black painter from the South by way of the midwest now living in NYC. He works part time at a gallery and part time for an art restorer, and, in his spare time, he is trying and failing to paint something that feels real to him. Taking place over a single summer, the book includes Wyeth’s budding relationship with former Jesuit and a mystery surrounding the discovery of a series of lithographs. But it is mostly about Wyeth. His internal anxieties about his art and the way his need for control inhibits authenticity.

When I started Minor Black Figures I was thrilled because I felt like I was seeing his thinking about books come to life in this book. This is a social novel that cares about how people exist in a complex ecosystem of other humans. It explores clashing ideologies, deepfelt friendships, and philosophies of art. It’s also a love story. In many ways, the book feels old fashioned and yet it is also extremely of its time, wrestling with technology, apathy, and life after the reality shattering events of 2020: Covid and the murder of George Floyd. Taylor manages to bring his own brilliant critic’s eye about art and ideology into this novel while still creating an emotional anchor for the reader and a flawed, but relatable character in Wyeth. I absolutely loved this book. It won’t be for everyone, but it was most certainly for me, and I am happy to say I have a new favorite Brandon Taylor novel.

I didn’t love this but I didn’t hate this. I would have enjoyed this more if it were shorter. Seeing how Wyeth’s mind works as he navigates his new environment in the NY art scene was interesting. Wyeth’s relationships with others and his inner conflict are the main focus of the story. The topic of the black body in art and the white gaze upon black artists is something that I’ve thought about, so seeing the topic explored in this book was neat.

Another main topic is the art scene in general and how Wyeth observes its “woke performance”. I couldn’t follow what Wyeth was doing sometimes because the art scene commentary was long winded and required lots of prior knowledge. The story would come back to the present moment after art critique explanations and I’d notice that the setting switched. I think all topics were explored effectively through the characters, but it could have been more concise.

Perhaps I’m not the prime audience for this book, but it felt like it was becoming what it was critiquing? At some point it was like the author was trying to create the Most Woke Sentence Ever. Wyeth would have an interaction with someone or create his art, and then it would shift to Wyeth’s thoughts about what happened. It felt like the author analyzed their own text through Wyeth’s thoughts and I thought that was annoying. There wasn’t a lot of room for interpretation for the reader, in my opinion. I don’t always read Lit Fic, but when I do I really enjoy when I have to work for the meaning of the story. I didn’t have to work for anything here.

Thank you to Brandon Taylor and Riverhead Books for providing the ARC ebook through NetGalley for this review!

Taylor's works have become either a great success in my mind, or an even greater disappointment. I think it's quite clear, sadly, that Minor Black Figures was the latter.

I really hope other readers will still enjoy it.

Thanks to Netgalley and Riverhead for the ebook. One of my favorite books of the year so far. We follow Wyeth, a young gay Black artist as he tries to figure out his career. He’s had a small success that’s given him enough money and encouragement to move to the city and share a workspace with other aspiring artists, but he doesn’t trust they particular style he’s used for that painting and then has to painfully search for something new, while he goes to galley parties and finds uninspiring work catch fire. He’s a bit lost and works at the grounding job of art restorer for a small company. Amid all this searching he finds a young man he falls for who is white and just recently left the priesthood. This is a great snap shot of the NYC art scene as we follow someone racing along trying to join in in some way.

Easily Brandon Taylor’s strongest since Real Life, which is saying something. Gorgeously written, and deftly tackles multiple situations, concepts, and existential questions with ease. The final exchange that ends Minor Black Figures in particular struck me—the sentiments and observations the characters speak of aren’t entirely new, but written by Taylor the dialogue is painstakingly endearing and earnest.

I could go on and on, but I’m just inordinately grateful I got a chance to read this as early as I have. Taylor continues to be an author whose work I’ll pick up on day one of release.

(Thank you so much to Riverhead for the opportunity to preview this title.)

When I read this novel, I was reminded of Rita Felski’s 2015 book “The Limits of Critique”. In short, her book examines how “critique” has become the dominant praxis in the humanities. Scholars have moved away from appreciating great works of art and literature and just commenting on the formal aspects of genre and themes. There is less affect, less description. Instead, trained in an array of subdisciplines (Marxist theory, Freudian psychotherapy, feminist reading, queer theory, postcolonialism), they engage in the higher act of critique, applying different methods and lenses in order to problematize the works in front of them. In this model of scholarship, the critic does not simply read texts but unmasks and demystifies them, exposing the structural, systemic and even subconscious origins of a piece of art or literature. Critique is a suspicious and cynical posture towards art and literature, always looking for the operative systems of power underpinning it—hegemony, patriarchy, heteronormativity, colonialism, the superego. Art becomes, like all cultural products, another object of academic scrutiny. But this exaltation of critique also means the evisceration of art, taking away any idea of beauty (isn’t this what critique is meant to show—that any beauty is just some invention of the white male bourgeoisie or, subversively, some resistance to it?)

So it is in this novel: Wyeth is a black painter who paints black figures, but he is troubled by his work. Everyone seems to think that his portraits mean something: that they are a political commentary, that they are a response to the BLM protests. He adapts a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s “Winter Light”, recasting the disconsolate priest as a black man. In the background lies the body of a suicide. What Wyeth meant to convey in his painting was a black figure experiencing spiritual doubt and disillusionment; what online viewers saw was an allusion to George Floyd and a history of state violence. Wyeth likes to paint black men in renaissance style and he is obsessed with French New Wave film. But other painters see all this as anachronism and whimsy, an artist failing to depict blackness in its contemporary realities. Whatever he does, Wyeth cannot escape a political presentism and racial reading of his work. When Wyeth looks at others’ portraits of black people, he in turn sees a vista of problematics: the exoticization of blackness, the essentialization of black identity into an inherent object, the treatment of the black person “a creature of sentimental curiosity” and at the same time “hypersaturating or desaturating the black figure to the point of abstraction”. Wyeth wants to depict a black person in 19th century Swedish knitwear or in the style of Sargent—but he can’t think of a way to represent blackness outside of contemporary politics and Ivy League preoccupations.

Unsurprisingly, Wyeth is unable to paint anymore. He has so thoroughly internalized the discipline of critique that he can no longer imagine a way to represent a black person without implicating them in broader representational tropes (if there is nothing outside the text, as Derrida says, then there can never be blackness outside of the traditions of slavery and centuries of racism). Wyeth worries about how his art will always be misinterpreted as some off-key statement of black activism; he also worries that if he depicts black figures, he will be perversely profiteering off his race rather than engaging in legitimate art (“identidarian art grift”); he wants to produce and sell art but he worries that the requisite pushiness and careerism, the networking at parties, the self-promotion on social media, will render his art mercantile and inauthentic; he worries that the proliferation of digitized copies online will dilute the value of the original piece; and he worries that if he depicts black people, they will no longer be real individuals, just faces subsumed into black identity. He wonders, then, if the only way to depict a black man would be to paint a white figure. He discovers in an exhibition, the bold claim that “true negro figuration would be depicting the white man as the object of histories of violence”—and he is enamored with this. Maybe blackness is not about black skin but about violence and subjection.

Wyeth is versed in all the academics trends and he talks theory with other artists reluctantly but with authority. But in practice, he is a traditionalist. He paints people because he likes the subtle features of their face or the distinctive course of their veins. He wanders the street taking photographs of moments, hoping to somehow transmute the moment into a painting that is “real”. He loves canonical artists from the renaissance to the early 20th century—from Caravaggio to Sargent. But theory has put him in perdition. He cannot create without torturing himself with critique, wondering whose eyeballs and whose hegemonic gaze will interpret his work. Can’t he just, he wonders, depict black people in the same way white artists depict white people—without it becoming a thesis on identity?

In this novel, Brandon Taylor has given a real novel of thoughts, showing an artist engaging with theory, with the craftsmanship and technique of art, with literature and cinema, and struggling with how to paint and to represent something “real” (whatever that might mean). In the end, Wyeth does depict a kind of black identity: a black sheep, a lost soul, an ex-Jesuit, Wyeth’s on-and-off-again boyfriend, Keating. Somehow, “it’s a black painting,” Wyeth thinks when he sees it at an exhibition. But for all Wyeth’s relentless self-examination over the ethics of representation, his boyfriend Keating is surprisingly hyper-scrutinized and under-theorized. Wyeth notices everything about his lover—the veins of his forearm, the coiffure in his hair, the classical proportions of his face; Wyeth intensely examines each of Keatings’ words, looking for offense; he wonders about all of Keatings’ actions, down to why he washed his hands after shaking them with homeless people; Wyeth understands on some level the spiritual crisis Keating has experienced. But he never really seeks to understand or probe the life-story of an ex-priest who has become a bricklayer and well-dressed New York hipster. He puts him on a pedestal and holds him there for a portrait—and somehow his agonized-over “black painting” feels unreal—he has objectified this white ex-priest as some shorthand for his own spiritual agonies.

I think there are a lot of lazy ways to pin this novel down—it’s about a black boy from the south who moved to New York to make art; it’s about a gay man struggling to find meaningful intimacy over short-term flings; it’s about the vicious competitiveness and pointless vanity of the art-market; it’s a slutty priest fantasy. But it’s also a deeply probing work that looks at leftwing culture politics with brave heterodoxy (not that Wyeth isn’t himself a pro-abortion, pro-gay leftwing artist himself—he just doesn’t accept the platitudes about black art and representation that are in vogue). What irks Wyeth is that reading, and celebrating, race and gender in art does not deconstruct or liberate race and gender but further essentializes them.

It's a complex novel that is cerebral and metaphysical but also humorous and sexy, too. My review, unfortunately, doesn’t give a sense of the heartbreak in the story, the messiness of Wyeth’s relationships, and the beautiful cattiness of queer solidarity. Although it sometimes has the dragging feel of a “flaneur” novel, there are some fantastic scenes and parallel plots that keep it running along. It's an ambitious novel and I look forward to reading the reviews when they come out.

Truthfully how am I supposed to write a review about this book? I loved each of BT’s works thus far, and each of them moved me in their own ways, but THIS ONE? It changed me. Profoundly.

I know a lot of people will not get this book, as I know a lot of people didn’t get The Late Americans. BT has a way of rambling on, waxing poetic with details and descriptions. He lingers in a way that few others do, in places that definitely slow the plot to an uncomfortable crawl. But in all his books, and in this one especially, the crawl is the point. The lingering, the pause, the waiting, is what it’s all for. He takes his time, slow like molasses on a hot summer day, and he wants you to take time out of your day to sit with him. As such, this is a relatively dense book. It’s easy enough to read, not so over the top that you can’t follow it if you focus a little, but it is pretentious in its philosophy. It forces you to play along with the game, to wander down the rabbit holes that Brandon himself has surely fallen down himself. I found myself researching things I never expected, reading about Sargent or Bergman, and the whole experience left me feeling like a door had opened within me. I fell deeply in love with Wyeth and his struggles and his passion - both because I saw myself in him and I saw how deeply different we are - and in many ways, I did feel like I went on a journey with him. He taught me a lot - or, BT taught me a lot - and coming out the other side, I don’t really know how to hold all of that within me.

This is a book that touches on so many important things, and I really do believe it’s The Novel of our time period. Of the 20s. It does things so few authors want to do - tackling things like the post-COVID landscape, the ways so many of us hide behind our ignorance, the question of where art fits in the modern technological world - and it does it in a way that is not only engaging and beautiful, but real. It made me think about a lot of things. It made me want to be a better person and a better artist and a better archivist. It reminded me of who I used to want to be, but gave up on during the pandemic.

And yes, of course, it’s such a quintessentially Black book. I think BT is such a fascinating author because he always writes about the strange intersection of Black and white, whether that’s in relationships or in artistry or in history. Mostly I feel like he poses a lot of questions. He ruminates and runs in circles and offers great points of discussion without really sharing how he feels about anything, as if asking the reader to come to their own conclusions, but you can read between the lines. You can see where his interests lie, where his own questions lead him, and it forces you to reconsider your own place in the world. Sure, this book hits me differently as a white person, and I have to sit with that, but that’s part of it. Sitting with it. Learning a lot, learning that there’s always more to learn. But also allowing myself to feel a connection with this book. With BT, with Wyeth, obviously with Keating.

God, I know it’s cliché to love a white man, but Keating…whew.

It feels like BT put a whole world inside of me, and I don’t know how to get it out. I’m not sure I want it out.

I will be thinking about this for a very long time and I cannot wait to own a paperback copy of this so I can reread it over and over and scribble in it relentlessly. A masterpiece.

I believe I've rated all of Brandon Taylor's novels five stars on the quality of the writing, but this is the first one that really moved me--the first one I found myself rereading passages and sitting in quiet contemplation, letting Taylor's words absorb and affect me.

I glanced at some others' reviews before sitting down to write mine, and I saw a few that said they'd tried to read his novels before but just couldn't get into them. This one began slowly for me, then blossomed. I found that I couldn't put it down, and not in a suspenseful, page-turning sort of way. This is a book that expands your mind, getting you to think about the nature of art, gaze, inspiration, and connection.

Brandon Taylor's new novel is a striking, often poignant collection that meditates on identity, intimacy, and the complex lives of characters often relegated to the margins. Taylor’s prose is as precise and emotionally charged as ever, offering brief but resonant glimpses into moments of vulnerability, desire, and disconnection. While some sections of the novel feel more like sketches than a fully realized narrative, their cumulative effect is mostly powerful. Taylor’s ability to capture emotional nuance remains impressive.

Minor Black Figures is the story about Wyeth, an artist in NYC maneuvering his identify specifically as a black artist, and what BLACK art means. He does this through his work and a variety of relationships. I did really enjoy this read. I liked the characters and the overarching ideas and conversations and symbols. However, there may have been too many things going on. Wyeth goes on political tangents in his head that I think would have carried more weight if the story was in 1st-Person. I would still highly recommend this as a read, but I’ve read and loved all of Taylor’s work, and so went in maybe a little too starry-eyed.

I’ve read all of Brandon Taylor’s books, so I was thrilled to receive an ARC of this one. I thoroughly enjoyed “Real Life” when I read it, which led me to read all of Brandon Taylor’s books since then.

Unfortunately, there’s been a significant downslide in my ratings of all of his books since then. And this one is now my least favorite.

Taylor’s books are never plot driven, but this one really wandered off track for me—to the point that I almost considered stopping it. Wyeth, similar to many of Taylor’s main characters in his novels, became even more and more irksome as time went on. While I found the sections about his (friendship and romantic) relationships very intriguing and interested, they were buried in overly drawn out sections about the intricacies of the art world, which didn't interest me.

I’ll be more selective with his future novels and let others read them first. Given the length of 400 pages, I’m not sure this one is worth the time and effort.

Another really wonderful novel from Brandon Taylor. When I read his work I sort of marvel at how well he continues the tradition of realist fiction—I guess I just mean I can feel the presence of Henry James somewhere in the work's DNA...So much precise, even granular information about the world of painting and visual art that made me wonder about just how much effort went into the research for the novel, which reawakened my interest in visual artists. Also, there's a character named Keating.

everyone wake up cus literary realism is soooo back!

i can hear some snoring already, which i know means that not everyone wants to read about a character going step by step through the coffee-making process, or about every single person/thing/event he happens to see on a walk. i think if this book wasn’t so specific to our time—both in its referentiality and its wide gestures towards the great crises of the current decade (representation in a world of hypermediation and hypervisibility, identity politics in the art world, faiths both sweeping and tiny and, conversely, faithlessness, picking up the pieces of a post-pandemic world (STAY WITH ME here because i know some people flee at the slightest inkling of temporal specificity and particularly in the form of referencing covid))—such detailed descriptions of the mundanities that crowd around these crises would not be as bearable. so much of the realist novel has been outmoded in contemporary fiction, which loves its fragments and obscurities and listlessnesses and poetics, that it does feel genuinely good to spend a few paragraphs making coffee in between heated discussions on subjectivity as translated through visual art.

and all of this is great already, but oh man, does taylor know how to write dialogue. here i specifically am thinking of writing dialogue that sometimes does not entirely make sense, because it’s not explaining something to the reader in the trite movie-script way, but rather depicting characters conveying themselves through the limitations of spoken communication. and indicating that sometimes the connecting link actually lies outside the words coming out of someone’s mouth. and showing that maybe there is no connecting link at all and the failure to communicate stoppers all exchange. and including the awkward isms and repetitivenesses and courtesies of daily speech. mm scrumptious.

because mediation is such a focal point of the novel, taylor’s prose is also profuse with references to all kinds of media—european films, classical music, and, of course, painters. i can only recall knowing one of these (rachmaninoff), which means there was probably a great deal of context i was missing, and also that i’m sure the novel will probably get accused of pretentiousness, because social media was only mentioned, like, once in comparison to its litany of (to me) mostly opaque references. for me i just kind of wish i knew fully what was going on, because having it explained is never as satisfying as knowing off the bat. so maybe i’m not pretentious <i>enough</i>, then (/s).

anyway, i think the characters themselves do lay out quite clearly what the novel is <i>about</i>, and in fact sometimes literally end up doing what the narrator is pontificating about, so there’s not only a kind of referential but also self-referential quality to taylor’s realism—representation as a closed circuit, almost? i feel as though this is partly what makes the feel book so distinctly contemporary, aside, obviously, from its content and ultramodern lexicon. it builds a world that talks about mediation through mediation of the world itself, moving through a quite anxious and existential type of storytelling that feels very current. but does this make the novel’s representational project more transparent than its plot and characters? idk. i sort of wanted to know more about wyeth and keating and all of the novel’s secondary characters. or maybe i’ve seen too much press content about what the book is trying to do. ultimately i cannot be the arbiter of its success, but i did very much enjoy the read.

My second try with this author. For whatever reasons, I’ve not been able to connect with his writing, characters, or plots, all of which fall flat for me. I can sort of understand why others like him, and can appreciate the various representations, so I am willing to recommend his books, both as a reader and as a librarian. For my own part, I can’t see myself trying a third book.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

This book is wonderful. On the surface, it follows an artist grappling with the search for meaning and direction in his work, caught between internalized self-doubt and the external pressures of expectation - particularly those tied to his identity as a Black artist. But it delves into so much more: the politics of identity and "wokeness," gay male intimacy, art restoration, the art world's often performative ethics, the financial and emotional precarity of surviving in New York, and the love of cinema that compels someone to try to paint it. It captures the ambivalence of loving/hating your peers while constantly measuring yourself against them, the alienation of online identity, and so much more. Despite juggling so many themes, the novel never feels scattered or overreaching. Its protagonist, Wyeth, is a richly drawn character - riddled with uncertainty, contradictions, and a sense of restlessness as he navigates the thirsty, often cynical terrain of the contemporary art scene (and a new situationship with a white guy who was close to becoming a priest).

One of the book’s little pleasures is how Taylor name-drops artists/films/books with specificity, yet occasionally withholds names, offering sly nods that feel like secret handshakes to the deeply well-read. It’s playful, provocative, never pretentious. My only complaint is that some of the descriptions about art restoration went on a bit long but even then, the plot within that thread (Wyeth investigating an artist from the 70s/80s) was extremely compelling. Anyway, fantastic book!!

I liked this VERY much. Not instantly. For a while the introspection and darkness were difficult and alienating. But as Wyeth’s life and alterations came into focus, so it all softened and I grew more tolerant of the agonizing self- consciousness haunting him. Did the art material intrude a little too much, now and then? I think so, but it was bearable.
Mostly I felt a sense of revelation about a particular character and an appreciation of the author’s efforts to capture it.
Bravo.

This is a very specific kind of book - cerebral, artsy, inward-looking - but I think it has a broader appeal than that description might imply. In the author's own words, "The novel follows Wyeth, a painter living in New York, as he grapples with what it means to be a painter in an era of hyper-mediation, and what it means to be a Black painter in an era of identitarian grift and the commercialization of identity. I wanted to write about a painter coming to terms with his own political expression when the very fact of political expression can sometimes feel like a pose or a gesture. It’s a book about painting and cinema and the gaze. It’s about COVID. It’s about New York. It’s about the fall of Roe. It’s about protest. It’s about silliness. It’s about a certain kind of spiritual crisis of the aging millennial in the face of History’s totality, trying to find a name for that crisis." And all of that could have gone wrong in the hands of a less skillful writer or one who is prone to pat answers or moralizing. The thing I love about Brandon Taylor, both in his fiction and in his various other writings, is his refusal to slide easily into the accepted grooves of thought on any given subject without coming across as simply contrarian. In this book, that refusal results in a main character who is grappling what all those well-worn grooves mean for his identity not only as a painter, but as a person who needs to interact with and form relationships with other people. And even if you've never painted or even thought much about visual art, I think you'll still appreciate and relate to Wyeth's attempts to make sense of his place in the particular slice of the world that he inhabits.

This novel is a layered exploration of art, love, identity, and the realities of living and surviving in New York City. What stayed with me most was the emotional depth of the Wyeths’ and Keating's relationship, which is raw, quietly tender, and beautifully human. Keating is vividly portrayed, from the tactile detail of his working hands to the reflection of his blond hair.

There's a quiet, intimate power in how we first meet Keating, yearning for a cigarette, and how that small, unspoken ritual carries through to their final moment together. It’s in those sidelong glances and the silence between drags that their deepest conversations happen. The novel closes by affirming that “choosing happiness isn’t selfish,” and it’s through these tender, unguarded moments, where they don’t even make eye contact, that their connection feels most honest and profound.

I appreciated the commentary on choosing between "work to work" and "real work," a conflict that resonates especially for those of us from working-class, immigrant, and first-generation backgrounds. While Wyeth has the privilege of pursuing their passions freely, it comes with many layers and guilt. We learn about all the steps necessary to pay rent and afford living in NYC.
Similarly, I enjoyed the discussion about social media and privacy, which addresses a sentiment many of us share: the disconnect between our online personas and true selves. It prompts us to consider how much of our relationships are based on curated information rather than authentic, in-person connections.

Personally, there were some bumps for me. At times, the prose wandered into long, observational tangents that, while rich in detail, occasionally lost momentum. The mix of plot threads: narrative of art restoration, Dell Woods, COVID-19, social commentaries, and relationships (random hookup that came out of nowhere) sometimes made it hard to grasp the story's direction. Still, the novel offered valuable insight, particularly in how it framed representation in art, specifically Black art, and explored themes of religion and cult-like communities. It made me think about who gets represented, who tells the stories, and at what cost.

A heartfelt and layered novel that thoughtfully explores love, labor, identity, and life in New York City. Despite its occasionally wandering structure, the emotional depth and beautifully crafted relationships make it a highly recommended read. As a fan of Real Life, I’m excited to continue supporting Brandon Taylor’s work.