Brandon Taylor's "The Late Americans" reinvents the campus novel with elegance and chaos.
Brandon Taylor's latest novel, The Late Americans, follows the intertwined lives of young people, mostly queer men, on a Midwestern college campus. Each chapter is told from the point of view of a different character, and the book is built daisy chain-style. The characters are united by their anger toward social pieties they consider aesthetically unpleasing or illogical. The book's ideas and images linger longer in the mind than its characters do, making it difficult to remember which character had which fantasy.