Minor Black Figures
A Novel
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4.3 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR!
From “literary superstar” (The Boston Globe) and Booker Prize finalist Brandon Taylor, his “most accomplished novel” (The New York Times): the story of a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity
New York simmers with heat and unrest as Wyeth, a painter, finds himself at an impasse in his own work.
After attending a dubious show put on by a collective of careerist artists, he retreats to a bar in the West Village where he meets Keating, a former seminarian. Over the long summer, as the two get to know each another, they talk and argue about God, sex, and art.
Meanwhile, at his job working for an art restorer, Wyeth begins to investigate the life and career of a forgotten, minor black artist. His search yields potential answers to questions that Wyeth is only now beginning to ask about what it means to be a black artist making black art amid the mess and beauty of life itself.
As he did so brilliantly in the Booker Prize finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings alive a captivating set of characters, this time at work and at play in the competitive art world. Minor Black Figures is a vividly etched portrait, both sweeping and tender, of friendship, creativity, belief, and the deep connections among them.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures is a ruminative meditation on art and identity. Young painter Wyeth is trying hard to find his place in New York’s post-COVID art scene. On top of the gossip, the backbiting, and the imposter syndrome, there’s the pressure to represent “the Black experience” in his art—a concept that doesn’t particularly excite him. There is so much to be explored here about race, creativity, and commodification, and perhaps unexpectedly, Taylor does it through a narrative that feels absolutely buzzy and sensuous. There’s a romance in Wyeth’s story, which begins when he meets Keating, a former seminary student who becomes his friend, his lover, and perhaps his muse. Even Taylor’s descriptions of Wyeth’s meticulous, tactile work at his day job as an art restorer feel hypnotically intimate. A fabulously evocative read, Minor Black Figures explores the process of self-discovery through love, art, and the gaps and pauses in between.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The gimlet-eyed latest from Taylor (The Late Americans) follows a creatively blocked painter through the New York City art world. Wyeth, who is Black and gay, feels enervated by the industry's tendency to commodify artist's identities and by the "careerist young painters" who play along. Nevertheless, Wyeth admits to having practiced "identity-based art grift" by selling a painting that viewers mistakenly read as commentary on the recent murder of George Floyd but was actually inspired by classic European cinema. Now, in search of a new subject, he struggles to square his sense of integrity with pressures on Black artists to represent their culture. He also frets over whether he can make a career as a painter, or if his "work work" as an art handler and restorer will become his "real work," thus proving the fallacy of this "juvenile" distinction. The ideas at play take on greater dimension in barbed banter between Wyeth and Keating, his new lover and potential muse ("In 2020, everyone died. And this year, everyone wants to come see the resurrection," Keating says, commenting on the city's housing shortage after Covid-19). Through it all, Taylor evokes the quiet pace of his protagonist's summer days, gesturing at the contemplative cinema Wyeth so appreciates. There's much to admire in this portrait of an artist in flux.
