Minor Black Figures: A Novel

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity

A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It’s challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist’s block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how show more to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.

As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: A Black, queer iteration of My Dinner with Andre. That means I loved it, if you're wondering.

Wyeth and Keating are talking machines, and since I was interested and involved in what they were talking about, I was very gruntled indeed. I can imagine that, if you're not interested in two people connecting to each other with ideas about Life, Culture, and maleness, you'll be bored stiff.

Keating, being white, does not see...and more importantly, does not see that he does not see...important truths about being Black. I've whacked into that wall more than once. If you have too, apologize to your Black friend immediately, and hope they care enough about you to educate you. That is the most generous gift I have ever received, being shown how my on blinkered perceptions are not reality for anyone but me. (Thank you, Rob, thank you Nicole, y'all are excellent teachers.)

I was slightly nonplussed by the use of third person narration in such a Wyeth-centered story, and filled with many omniscient descriptions of Wyeth's thoughts...I get that it's like Louis Malle's camera from the films, but the point of a novel feels different than the point of a film. No matter. I think the ideas in the book, the conversations these men navigate, the channels they create with their flowing words, are fun and fascinating.

They won't be to people seeking action, events, or even simple changes in the characters...they are themselves, they don't so much alter as reshape their borders and boundaries to fit up against the other's more comfortably.

Are you, like me, in the early-winter mode of contemplation, of examination, of making sense of this wild and precious life we're (mostly) wasting? Here's us a book.

Recommended because it is exactly what it says it is, a rare gift in the literary world of hyperbole. show less

This book was, in its individual parts, filled with imperfection, with rambling screeds, lectures on agency, morality, truth, integrity and God. There were long and somewhat splintered digressions on the nature of art. And I loved it. This was a portrait of a community, a life, a place that was, in an earlier incarnation, my community, my life, and my place. It saved me as it saved the MC Wyeth. In my 20's, when I connected with artists living in NYC (this was the 80s), sleeping in Alphabet City squats with often non-functional plumbing and shared beds, I felt for the first time that I could speak, say what I really meant, and if I got shit back that was fair, and the world would not end. Of course, I was soon living the dual life as a show more law student where hyper self-consciousness was my reality. It was a weird time. Wyeth's obsession with what others were thinking of him, the paralysis it inspired, felt so real to me, and also gave me new perspectives on others and on myself. His struggles are different because in many ways this Black, queer art-school-trained man who grew up in a trailer in the South is utterly different from me, and his experience in the world differs (the discussion of what makes art or artists Black Art or Black Artists was wonderful), but I felt real kinship and sharp enlightenment throughout.

Thanks go to Derek Driggs, who has become something og my reading soulmate here on GR. After reading Taylor's Real Life, I had decided pretty absolutely that Taylor was not the author for me. Derek urged me to give him another chance, that he thought I would like this, and somehow he knew. show less

Short take : I didn’t like this book but there are some interesting observations and at times excellent writing. But it’s digressive, solipsistic, navel gazey, and superficial, either insincere or failing a Turing test for sincerity, in spite of aspirations for depth and meaning. Oh we are young and beautiful and know everything and we are just SO interesting, dahlink. The plot is an afterthought at best. plenty of people have loved this and will love it; but I’m not one of them and highly doubt I’ll read anything else of his.

Wyeth, you grew on me. The internal monologues in trying to puzzle out the world around, yes. Very well done. Most of the painting art/drama form was lost on me. I enjoyed Wyeth's company, regardless. Keating must have been a looker b/c I didn't understand the fascination.

One of those books that makes me put it down and stare off into space for ten minutes while I think about some interesting question it raises. I'm a fan of this trend I see for novels that engage seriously with visual art -- the Teju Cole book, Scaffolding, and now this.

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