Fifteen years ago, in the halcyon days of social media, book publicists began urging fiction writers to set up social media accounts, particularly on Twitter, to help promote their books. Many of the authors I knew groused that nothing worth saying could be said in 140 characters or less, but they signed up and grudgingly posted announcements of pub dates, book signings, giveaways, and the occasional link to a positive review, none of which attracted much notice, let alone book sales. They didn’t enjoy the watercooler banter that was Twitter in those days, long before it was bought by Elon Musk. If they’d wanted to hang out around a watercooler, they said, they wouldn’t have become writers.
But others took to the relatively new platform. Well-known authors created Twitter accounts that ranged from eccentric musings that annoyed, baffled, and charmed their followers to chatty posts offering book recommendations, pet photos, and political opinions. Midlist writers found community and friendship there, a place that offered support through a tricky rewrite or a career setback, at least for a while. And for a very few writers, Twitter did reach readers who might otherwise have never heard about their work. Because, despite the disdain of the old-guard literati, Twitter is writing. A good Twitter feed, one that balances the form’s propensities toward bombast and TMI, entertainment and intimacy, newsiness and the quotidian, is not an easy thing to craft.
The fiction writer Brandon Taylor, whose second novel, The Late Americans, has just been published, is excellent at Twitter. Taylor tweets a lot, a gentle, irresistible patter of observations, shrewd asides, declarations of thirst, idle questions, gossip, and sheepish confessions, and this cascade comes to feel like regular check-ins with a close friend—the smart, cheeky classmate whose whispered wisecracks and lunch-break confidences are the only thing that kept you sane through sophomore year.
If a parasocial relationship can ever be wholesome, the way that I and many of his nearly 100,000 followers feel about Taylor’s Twitter account comes pretty close. Oh, to have a friend like this to text with all day, someone witty and omnivorously curious, widely and deeply and joyfully read, and above all so funny! This sentiment is exactly what book publicists have hoped their authors’ Twitter accounts would inspire, that illusion of friendship—because only a jerk doesn’t buy their friend’s book.
What it’s like to preside at the center of this illusion would make a fascinating subject for a fiction writer to take on. Unlike the other forms of celebrity, this one is small in scale and the object of deliberate creation on a more than daily basis. In her wonderful 2021 novel No One Is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood—who is so good at tweeting that the New York Times Magazine profiled her—writes about the “certain airy prominence” her autobiographical main character attains thanks to an absurdist tweet gone viral. But that novel is less about the act of creating an online persona than about the disorienting contrast between a real-life tragedy and how it feels to participate in a “stream-of-a-consciousness that is not entirely your own … one that you participate in, but that also acts upon you.” Nevertheless, Lockwood’s novel taps into and expands upon the voice and mind evident in her Twitter account, and the writer of both works (the feed and the book) is manifestly the same person.
The same can’t be said for The Late Americans, a novel that is really a linked short story collection much like Taylor’s previous book, 2021’s Filthy Animals. Both collections depict an ensemble of characters in their 20s, most of them MFA grad students at Midwestern universities. The Late Americans is set in Iowa City, the site of the University of Iowa, whose famous writers’ workshop Taylor attended. The characters are poets, dancers, painters, musicians—but not, perhaps for reasons of autobiographical diplomacy, fiction writers. Most of them are also gay men of varying racial and class backgrounds. They spend much of their time in cafes and at parties being mean to one another in conversations where the simplest statements are weighted by tons of fraught and exhaustively detailed subtext; reading these scenes is like watching someone dissect a croissant flake by flake. Every character has a past trauma they are either flaunting or hiding. There are a handful of couples, all of them miserable, who break up and get back together, then break up again, and everyone has sex with everyone else, which never seems to lift their spirits much. It’s easy to get the characters (particularly the dancers) mixed up, and there isn’t much in the way of a plot.
In short, The Late Americans readily fulfills the stereotype of “workshop fiction”—that is, character and relationship portraits that naturally assume an open-ended short-story form. One of the more distinctive characters in the novel, an isolate who enviously watches the central characters socializing from a distance, thinks, “There was a weird sleep logic to college life, associative, random, lacking strict connection,” and since the novel feels like this too, maybe that’s the point. Taylor’s characters are idling in life’s antechamber, giving up on dance careers that have petered out at the limits of their talents, or resigning themselves to teaching in fields where they once hoped to make a mark. They have come down to the dregs of what school has to offer, and they don’t know what they want or what to do with themselves next. They are indeed late, and their hobbled, tetchy interactions are filled with land mines.
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In one such scene, a pianist turned logician named Timo and his wealthy friend Goran discuss the OnlyFans account that Goran’s broke boyfriend, Ivan, has set up to fund an upcoming move to New York. Timo suggests that Goran is being overly judgmental about this, which is a bit rich given how mercilessly bitchy Timo is to his own boyfriend, Fyodor, because Fyodor works in a meatpacking plant and didn’t go to college. Goran doesn’t appreciate the input, Timo realizes:
Timo regretted now, more than just a moment before, having said anything. How stupid he’d been to say anything when it wasn’t his place. Goran had fixed him with a stare like a faithful bloodhound having caught the scent of something alive and fearful. Timo searched himself for purchase, for something to hold on to, but there was nothing there. He slid down the slick, inner surface of himself like a lizard in a glass. What could he say in the end except, “Sorry.”
Is there a readership eager for fiction that catalogs every fiber of the despair and ambivalence in mundane interactions? Probably. Does it extend much beyond the members and alumni of MFA programs? Doubtful. It may be possible to write a novel about people slogging through directionless lives without the novel becoming a slog itself, but Taylor hasn’t done that. As a reader, I don’t know why anyone would even want to. This type of fiction aspires to realism, and reality does indeed include some brooding and wheel-spinning. But in contrast to Taylor’s less formal online writing—the stuff often dismissed as a form of self-promotion or marketing—his fiction feels disappointingly stunted, as if the full range of Taylor’s own experience has been narrowed to fit the Iowa workshop mold.
Perhaps the most startling difference between The Late Americans and Taylor’s lively social media voice is the novel’s relative lack of humor. On Twitter and in his Substack newsletter Sweater Weather, Taylor’s writing fizzes with ideas and the joy of playing with them. There, he is constantly engaging with past masters in lively new ways and vaulting sharp little darts into the center of cultural complacency.
There is just a taste of that latter mischief in The Late Americans, in two chapters told from the point of view of Seamus, a poetry grad student from a white working-class background. The chapter that opens the novel begins with Seamus stewing in his own disaffection during his poetry seminar. The workshop has, in his view, become “less like a rigorous intellectual and creative exercise and more like a tribunal for war crimes. Seamus hated it very much—not because he believed that trauma was fake, but because he didn’t think it necessarily had anything to do with poetry.” The other students dredge up their wounds and oppressions to wear as badges of legitimacy. They allude to fashionably incendiary theorists whose work they don’t actually understand. Seamus deems one of his classmates to be “the kind of poet whose work was chiefly about herself, as if all that had transpired in the existence of humankind was no more consequential than the slightly nervy account of her first use of a tampon. He thought her poems craven and beautiful and utterly dishonest.” He, by contrast, has stalled out working on a sonnet cycle about 15th-century Alsatian nuns fishing dead orphans out of a river.
Seamus is, of course, insufferable. But Seamus is … not wrong about the weaknesses of his peers. And he’s also disastrously insensitive in his response to those weaknesses. “People do have feelings,” his only friend in the seminar reminds him, “and it’s okay that they do.” Seamus goes on to commit several blunders that serve to take him down a peg, but he also writes a decent poem and then endures the vengeful critiques of the same classmates whose work he disdains. He has “gone around giving away all his power,” he realizes, “seeking certainty, approval.” The resolution feels a bit pat, but this small arc of actual progress, amid all the glum eddying of the rest of the novel, suggests that Taylor has the makings of that rarest of treasures, a compassionate satirist.
Taylor is a beguiling writer, but the best of his voice is seldom found in his fiction, with its heavy cloak of figurative language. Something about writing fiction makes Taylor feel obliged to deliver a lot of Writing with a capital W. “The early-evening sky is the color of crushed lilacs,” goes one line in Filthy Animals. Why crushed? Is the color of crushed lilacs recognizably distinct from the uncrushed kind, and if so, does anyone (outside a tiny minority of clumsy florists) know that? But the extra word sounds good—self-consciously artful. In comparison, Taylor’s brilliant Substack essay on internet novels describes Lockwood’s novel as offering “that kind of insight that is native to a really bad migraine. When you might think, between pulses of agony, that cows are the dogs of horses or how mammals are named for boobs.” These lines have the easiness of unmannered expression while sacrificing none of the vividness. They ping in the reader’s mind not as specimens of lovely prose but as something true.
“There was a certain kind of poet,” thinks Seamus in that first chapter of The Late Americans, “for whom prestige was the point.” That’s true for other kinds of writers too. There’s the work typically thought of as “serious,” which is also the type of writing that garners the most prestige (and the least money). Writers often approach it with a formality and a conviction of its import that can stifle the exercise of their natural voice. As a rule, it’s also when working in prestige genres like literary fiction that writers tend to get blocked. Editors and teachers often suggest getting around the chokepoint by pretending to write a letter or email about what you want to say, as if explaining it to a friend. This approach can unlock a writer’s true voice, allow his whole self to shine through, and streamline and simplify his goals. Taylor’s superb online writing seems to have been created in this frame of mind. I can’t help wishing that his fiction was too.
