Brandon Taylor’s third novel, following the Booker-shortlisted Real Life and 2023’s The Late Americans, is full of hands. It’s set in the years after a pandemic that made many people desperate “to touch and be touched”. Long before then, no one had ever held the hand of its chief character, a young painter called Wyeth – not even his mother. In the doldrums, he recalls a conversation with a printmaker who extolled lithography because the images it produces reveal the strength and dexterity of an artist’s fingers: human marks. Poring through a company’s digital files, he has a near-seizure when he comes across a handwritten ledger: “There was something almost romantic about the curves of the numbers, elegant and swooping.”
Wyeth was born in Virginia, a state where, within living memory, Black farmhands developed cancer because they weren’t given gloves to pick the tobacco that would later poison their blood. He grew up in a trailer park with his white mother, a nursing assistant. To be working class, fatherless and from the south: this was, for him, a kind of isolation chamber. It led him to imagine that “the future and history belonged to another species of human that did not include him and his family and their distant relations”.
Now he’s in New York. It’s summertime, meltdown time. Wyeth worries he ought to be out on the streets photographing righteous protesters, but neither his heart nor art is in it. He has gigs at a Chelsea gallery and as an art-restorer, but his own work seems to be going nowhere. His small-scale canvases feature scenes from European auteur cinema – Rohmer, Bergman – with the white characters replaced by Black figures. One friend tells him they’re “thought experiments, not paintings”. Another criticism he hears is that they’re “bourgeois, betraying a desire for black ease and affluence”.
Minor Black Figures is stacked with Wyeth’s thoughts about the state of Black art and aesthetics in the modern USA. Some are catty takedowns of what he calls “diasporic grifters”, opportunists who turn their “identity into a political glaze to be slathered all over their brand”. Some are specific: of Kehinde Wiley, whose portrait of Barack Obama hangs in the Smithsonian, he complains, “Yes, he painted beautiful people, but the nakedly commercial enterprise of it, the representational politics of ‘Black is beautiful’, was as arid and tedious as secular liberalism.”
Taylor is echoing Rachel Hunter Himes who, in a recent issue of Triple Canopy, argued that too many critics applaud the work of Black artists for being “urgent, relevant, and timely”, and that “understood as a shorthand for artistic meaning, blackness can short-circuit other potential or latent meanings”. Wyeth asks: “Could there ever be a painting of a black figure that was not reenacting some gross historical harm?” He believes, “Even the phrase negro figuration presupposed a constructed social identity that had to be wrenched open and climbed out of in order to get to a place of actual subjective experience.” The issues at play here are important, but the language in which they’re couched is often crabbed and inert, redolent of academic conferences and earnest art journals.
Just as enervating is Wyeth himself. “I’m exhausting and cynical,” is his belated self-diagnosis. He’s not wrong. When his observations about New York – it’s noisy! – aren’t hackneyed, they’re fastidious and finicky. He sees a girl holding a balloon and wonders, “What did it mean to her, this shape, this object? What was the source of her delight in it? The texture? The tension of the rubber?” It’s unclear whether Taylor is making fun of him or trying to reveal how artists look at the world. His use of free indirect speech adds to the uncertainty – lights are “uncannily egg-like”; a boy’s face has “a curious luminance”; in a park a character feels “a certain upward titration of his risk”: is such clumsy language meant to index Wyatt’s gaucheness, or does it reveal that of the author?
There are people in Wyeth’s orbit – waspish painters and video-makers with whom he shares a studio – who might have offset his stilted sententiousness. Too often they’re portrayed in slapdash fashion: one of them, we’re told, “like many gay men in their early thirties, always looked severe and angry, like he was contemplating voting against the end of slavery out of sheer spite”. Late evening, at a bar, Wyeth meets a former priest called Keating who is described as beautiful – “Not in some cheesy way, not in the Raphaelite sense that made a great beauty out of every twink and skinny white man”. Given his tendency toward ornery pomposity, I can’t imagine Wyeth saying or thinking this.
Wyeth and Keating’s relationship grows, falters, drifts. It’s tentative, almost as lethargic as summer. They talk – sometimes seriously, sometimes boringly. They have a bit of a hiatus after Wyeth asks Keating why, after he’s been hanging about with a group of homeless men and women, he washes his hands. Hot priests may be all the rage these days, but it’s hard for us to get worked up about their affair. Early on, in one of the many chunks of authorial didacticism that bung up Minor Black Figures, Wyeth wonders if it’s possible to “preserve the insignificance of the ordinary. Render it in its natural mode.” Perhaps it is. Not here, though.
• Minor Black Figures by is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
