Minor black figures

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. (Oct.)

A painter struggles to reconcile identity, money, art, love, and sex. Taylor's contemplative and sensuous third novel concerns Wyeth, a young gay Black painter in New York who's hit an artist's block. During the pandemic he enjoyed a brief bit of Instagram-driven fame with a stark painting of a dead Black man, which observers assumed was a post--George Floyd commentary on race. But he was mainly tinkering with a composition he admired in an Ingmar Bergman film, and he bristles at identity politics. Still, Wyeth's principled distancing has mostly just made him anxious and impoverished, working at a gallery and for an art restorer to afford a fifth-floor walkup. A random meeting with Keating, a white man who's recently abandoned the Catholic priesthood, suggests an opportunity for positive change--if Wyeth isn't too ambivalent and self-abnegating to pursue it. In broad strokes, the novel has the shape of a romance--boy meets boy, boy ghosts boy, etc.--but it's also a fine social novel, thick with urbane particulars. Taylor writes about the meticulous details of lithograph restoration with the same kind of erotic, graceful attention he lavishes on Wyeth's assignations, and the novel has a seductive intellectual energy, as Wyeth struggles to find a way to be a Black artist without feeling burdened by racial interpretations--and wonders why that should feel like a burden. ("You are of the world, are you not?" a confidante asks, challenging him.) Some of Keating and Wyeth's exchanges can feel like potted, podcast-y discussions, but more often Taylor is onto something rich and appealing--a story unafraid to foreground love and lust, and that treats emotional ambiguity as a starting point, not as the fuzzy ending common in literary fiction. A piercing, precise, and affecting tale of young love and high art. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.