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- [00:04]
Interviewer
When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the.
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Brandon Taylor
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Interviewer
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Brandon Taylor
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Interviewer
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Brandon Taylor
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Interviewer
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Brandon Taylor
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Interviewer
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Brandon Taylor
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Interviewer
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- [00:59]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:06]
Interviewer
I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Rahman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter. Burnedbybooks. Let's start the show. Wyeth, the protagonist from Brandon Taylor's latest novel, Minor Black Figures, is in an artistic rut. His paintings and photographs of black life, decontextualized from recognizable American contexts are read as out of step with his peers in the contemporary art world of New York City, particularly those who make money and a life from their work. When Mango Wave, a collective of young artists that Wyeth sees as running an all too familiar identity grift, makes a splash and sells out at an exhibit, Wyeth retreats into introspection about his work and his value to a society that would like to confine representations of blackness to recognizable tropes. It is at this point that he meets Keating, a gay, failed seminarian with whom he begins an intense physical and intellectual relationship. The two will engage each other in a philosophical grappling match as their desire begins to catch fire. They discuss the role of faith and belief at a moment when such things are best understood by their hypocrisies. They talk art and its power and fragility, and they take in the city in high summer, lovers on the verge of something substantial. When Wyeth begins to investigate the work of a forgotten black artist, he's called to question the very constitution of his identity as an artist while recommitting to a conception of artistic freedom that is at times at odds with the tide of black political life. Minor Black Figures Much like Taylor's much beloved Booker Prize finalist, real life draws its power from the intersection of physical and metaphysical life, and it does so with humor and with an eye for the ways in which intimacy allows us to embody and understand more completely the contradictions that make us whole. A major work from a young writer who's just beginning to reveal the complexity with which he understands the figuration of life in literature. Minor Black Figures runs at the pace and thrum of life in New York City, while calling upon dialectics much older than the city itself. Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels the Late Americans and Real Life, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize and named a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice and a Science plus Literature Selected title by the National Book Foundation. His collection Filthy Animals, a national bestseller, was awarded the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. He was the 20222023 Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman center for Scholars and Writers. A very warm welcome to Brandon Taylor.
- [05:30]
Brandon Taylor
Oh my gosh, thank you for having me. That was such a moving introduction. I Feel like I understand my book better now for having listened to you talk about it. I'm sort of astonished.
- [05:42]
Interviewer
Oh, my goodness. Well, that's so nice of you to say. And it is a book that will be living in my brain for a very long time. I just absolutely just. I. I reveled in the conversations that Wyeth and. And Keating have. And I want to start by talking about your choice to have this particular narrative voice and style. I mean, Minor Black Figures is a novel all about the tacit and understood limitations placed on black art and representations of black life. And you put us in perhaps the most recognizable novelistic form of voice and narrative of the novel, free indirect discourse. Why was this the voice with which to give us Wyatt Wyeth's world?
- [06:28]
Brandon Taylor
I think. Oh, I love this question. So, as you know, I love to nerd out about POV and free indirect discourse. And it's the Jane Austen in me. What can I say? You know, I mean, I think in part it came from a desire to both want to be incredibly close to Wyeth and to have access to his subjectivity, but also to preserve the ability for the novel to occasionally speak with the voice of the world and to some, occasionally, very occasionally, be able to sort of, I don't know, have the novel speak with the voice of the world, but to sort of make that voice of the world one person somehow at the same time. And so it's just such a magic.
- [07:11]
Interviewer
Trick of free and direct.
- [07:13]
Brandon Taylor
Exactly. Your sort of plausible deniability. Is that the voice of the God of the novel, or is that just this character's interiority? Who can say? But there's something, like, quite magical about that to me. Like, the way that the sort of ambiguity of that and not knowing if that's, like, what the novel thinks is, like, capital T, truth. Or is, has or has the novel slipped back into Wyatt's perspective? Right. And so it reminds us, reminds me at least, that the novel is always a kind of subjective form, and it feels like a form that's, like, quite. I don't know, like, natural to me as like, a millennial who maybe spends too much time online.
- [07:53]
Interviewer
Say more about that.
- [07:56]
Brandon Taylor
Well, there's just something about how like. Like, social media is a form that is dominated by, like, visuals and video and. And where even if you're sort of taking a video of your own face, like it's a third person that's also kind of sneakily a first person.
- [08:16]
Interviewer
Right. Yeah. Wow. And I've never thought of it in that way.
- [08:20]
Brandon Taylor
And even when I'm writing tweets, I'm of course, like, writing them like as myself, but like, I've seen slipped inside of some Persona that's also a character. And, and so it just kind of, I don't know, it feels like free and direct is kind of the way that we operate online and on social media. It's kind of the default narrative mode. And so it's just like, I don't know, it's my default somehow. But I, I did have like, more formal reasons for it, which was that I felt I needed to be able to be both subjective and also to occasionally slip out into sort of wider vistas. Right. And free indirect lets you, lets you do that. You get both the, the, the sort of objective but also the deeply personal.
- [09:00]
Interviewer
That the, the kind of, perhaps organicness of the millennials use of FID is going to be so fascinating for my colleague Kasia Bugtishinska, who's writing a book on fid, and he's going to want to quote that for sure, this is an intellectual novel, but I, I, I would say very pointedly that it is not inert or cold in the way that some, what I would call intellectual or philosophical novels of a certain tradition can be. And particularly as it concerns the ways in which Wyeth and Keating consummate their relationship as equally a sort of physical and metaphysic physical 1. Sex and ideas are interwoven threads of the same notion of shared intimacy. How did you go about negotiating the sort of the feel of that dueling intimacy?
- [09:59]
Brandon Taylor
Well, I mean, the truth is that I really love French movies. I really love the films of Eric Romer and Maurice Pialat, and I love the sort of French cinematic tradition where the people seduce each other by talking and arguing about ideas and about, you know, these like, existential questions while they're walking through, you know, like, empty streets or they're sort of roaming about. And so when I set out to write this book, I, I wanted to write a book where people talk and fall in love by talking and fall in love by coming to know each other somehow. And that to me felt like, not revolutionary because Meg Ryan movies exist, but like it.
- [10:45]
Interviewer
And Before Midnight, one of my favorite walk and walk and talks.
- [10:50]
Brandon Taylor
Oh my God, I love a walk and talk movie. Right? And I, and I somehow that like, I had been reading a, like a bunch of contemporary literature where the characters were just like, not talking anymore and, and not to sort of bring up Georg Lukash this early in the conversation, but like one of the, like One of the things that Lukash talks about in both his articles, physiognomy, the intellectual physiognomy and characterization and narrator describe is that he talks about how in the sort of capitalist bourgeois realism, dialogue only exists to show how isolated the characters are and to show how impossible it is to communicate meaningfully with other people. And I felt like somehow there are a lot of books where people are just, like, talking and saying nothing and not really comprehending each other. And so I thought, man, I just, like, really want to write some conversations where people hear what one another are saying but disagree and, like, have to talk their way to a mutual understanding or to a mutual truce or to, like, a victory or a stalemate or whatever. Like, I just, like, wanted to. To. To write about people talking, but at the same time, me being me. I. I thought. But also, like, if they think, if the. If the characters are people who enjoy talking, then they're gonna find it really hot when someone's ideas stimulate them and they're gonna wanna have sex, right? And those two things will go together as they often do in life. And so I feel like, for me, this book was about reminding myself about the pleasure of having those really exciting, invigorating conversations with people whose minds just, like, set you on fire and the sort of ensuing physicality that comes from that. And it was fun. It was fun to rediscover the pleasure of conversation in fiction, at least for me.
- [12:41]
Interviewer
And I don't know why the publisher didn't put a subtitle A Walk and Talk in a anti Lukashian vein right there. Instant bestseller.
- [12:53]
Brandon Taylor
I would have picked it up. I mean, but.
- [12:54]
Interviewer
Yeah, me too.
- [12:55]
Brandon Taylor
I mean, I have the Lukashian sickness. What can I say?
- [12:58]
Interviewer
Say, well, I love that, and I love a reinvigoration of the idea of talking, hearing one another and disagreeing, because that certainly is a great description of Wyeth and Keating and. And it is. It what's. It feeds their desire, which is always equal parts intellectual and. And physical.
- [13:19]
Brandon Taylor
And I think just like, one more thing before we leave, that topic is like, they ask each other questions, right? Like they. They ask each other.
- [13:26]
Interviewer
Which is a dying art, right?
- [13:30]
Brandon Taylor
Well, I mean, not for you. You're keeping it alive with the pod, right? But, you know, you have two people who don't know everything about each other, who ask one another questions and ask one another to elaborate. Hey, what did you mean by that? Or, like, don't you think this? Or what do you think about that? And I find that that's like One of the most, I mean, like one of the most attractive traits in a person, but also it's like such a moment of vulnerability to sort of reveal that like, you want to know more, right? Like, it's the sort of anti chill. I think maybe part of why conversations feel so staid these days in whatever media form is that everybody's so afraid of being non chill that they're afraid to even ask a question. And you know, I had fun, I had fun writing two people asking each other questions and wanting to get to know one another.
- [14:18]
Interviewer
Yeah, and hard questions too. We'll get to some of them soon. But not. These are not like chill questions. These are, no, definitely anti, Anti chill questions.
- [14:30]
Brandon Taylor
I mean, I think one of the questions like, you know, why Wyeth asks a question that he thinks is like fairly simple, and Keating is like, you know, there have been holy wars fought about that very question. Like, like, yeah, that's not an easy question.
- [14:44]
Interviewer
Well, that's another thing that I, I, I admire and, and wanted to talk to you a little bit about is that you are someone who wants your characters to believe that there is more of a context to questions than just the imminent now that there are histories of, of conversations about these same things. And I feel like what gets lost in a lot of contemporary fiction is this idea that characters are discovering a, a question about humanity or history or politics or culture for the very first time. And neither Wyeth nor Keating believes that they're doing that. I wonder if you'd talk about, like, what it means to have a history of ideas enter a conversation.
- [15:28]
Brandon Taylor
I mean, this is the thing I feel talk about the Lukash of it all. I, I feel so passionately about this and it, I also teach creative writing and it drives me bonkers when my students, I get a student writing a book about a pop star talk about like a historically determined career and life, and she's writing a book about a pop star. And I was like, what, did she become famous? And the student said, I don't really, I don't really think about that. I don't really want to think about that. And I was like, well, if she became famous in 2008, that's one thing. If she became famous in 2010, that's another thing. She became famous after the invention of itunes, that's yet another thing. And like, actually does, like, it really does matter. Right? And I think it's one thing for your character not to think about it, but for the author not to think about it. And I think, like, for these characters, it just felt important that both of them, you know, like one's a seminarian, one's an artist, like both of those people, there's no way for them to do their work without being deeply aware of the traditions, modes and like legacies of various ideas that have like preceded their practicing of before. There's just like no way to be an artist if you like, don't know like what realism is or modernism or like what the various isms are and how they're interacting. And, and I just think like there's too much recency bias, there's too much ahistorical fiction. There's too much fiction unfolding in a sort of vacuous like non historical moment. And it feels to me like quite dangerous somehow. Like it feels like the fiction of this era. If we don't sort of get our heads on straight about this, we're gonna end up writing a fiction that is totally deracinated of any sort of social valence, any sort of political valence, any sort of human valence. And then what will you have but a series of like, what does Lukash say? Like a compendium of sensorial data. And like what good is that to anybody?
- [17:28]
Interviewer
I mean, amen to all of that.
- [17:30]
Brandon Taylor
Not to get, not to get carried away. Not to get carried away about it.
- [17:33]
Interviewer
No, I, I, I love it. And, and one of the, the ways in which characters, particularly Wyeth, is engaging with a, a deep time history of ideas is in thinking with and engaging with the idea of embodiments of black lives as, as figurations in visual art. And Wyeth Bach's at having his work either be co opted into a presentist political vision of black suffering or you know, at, at the same time feeling pained in the ways in which he's seen as perhaps having turned his back on history. And I wonder if you'd read a scene that really gets to this conflict for us.
- [18:21]
Brandon Taylor
So Wyeth is in the midst of researching this obscure black artist named Del woods. And Del woods has been in a show called Negro Figuration many, many decades ago. And Wyeth is thinking about how like questions of Negro figuration then are kind of unchanged from the questions around Negro figuration now. And he feels kind of depressed about that. He feels somehow depressed by the fact that these questions haven't changed very much despite much social progress happening. And so here we are. The second feeling was crushing sadness when he thought of those early crits at UW Madison when he'd been painting black Men and women into Romero movies, doing a kind of riff on genre painting, at least in his mind. And when his classmates had accused him of turning his back on the history of that moment, the black martyrs made in the streets as innocent black children were murdered by the police, he recognized in that dynamic some of the tension explored in the Negro figuration show. It seemed that black artists had gone from trying to expand the possibilities of the Negro figure to a. To rigidly and strictly policing what was and what was not politically valent with respect to that figure. It was sad, both because they were in some ways fighting the same fight, trying to carve out a space for black subjective experience, freedom for black people to paint what they wanted, and also because they were fighting that fight with fewer tools and narrower vision, depressing beyond belief. He didn't want to paint his cousins amid the pecan groves or the peach orchards. He didn't want to draw them riding in the back of the brown pickup truck while his uncle drove. No, that was boring. He wanted to paint them in the beautiful homes he saw in magazines that he read and sometimes stole from the Winn Dixie. But he'd learned about the black figure and read poems about black bodies and been accused of creating unrealistic and incoherent images. Black people on the Breton coast, black people outside of a stone house in a rural suburb of Paris. Black people rendered in a beach scene a la boudin, as though one needed to explain the presence of blackness in a tableau, as though blackness couldn't exist except under exact aesthetic and historical conditions. Even when he tried to free himself of these considerations and achieve a pure subjectivity, he was stuck on the idea that to render a black figure was to render it from the outside side, and that was a kind of objectification. Could one achieve that objectification of the black figure without recapitulating violent and hegemonic ideas or themes or tropes? Was any painting of a black person of violence? Could there ever be a painting of a black figure that was not reenacting some gross historical harm? Was the very desire to. To create a black figure outside of history itself a reflex against gross historical harm? Did white people have that same baggage when Wyeth had painted white men? He did not think of that. When he looked at white men, he had absolutely no qualms about objectifying them. He did not fret over the delicacy of their souls or the possibility of their figure being a site of gross historical harm. He was mostly concerned with the play of light on their shoulders or in their eyes when he saw them. He did not, for example, think of the Thirty Years War, though perhaps he should have. Maybe his paintings would have been better if he'd thought of that. It was interesting, this idea of painting a white man with the same set of considerations of violence, history and or objectification which were usually imported into the figuration of black people. That, Wyeth thought was true Negro figuration. Not the depicting of black figures, but that any figure depicted with the set of considerations normally reserved the black figure, could itself be made into a black figure. He thought of the reference photos he had taken of Keating. He thought too of what Bernard had said at the idea of Wyeth painting Keating painting a white man he'd fucked. How typically faggot it was true, there was an awful lot of that going around these days. Gay men painting men in their dicks, gay men depicting the nude male form in increasingly subjective styles, and indeed ugly as any means to counteract what exactly. Wyeth was not sure. There had been very little of that in his art school. Well, that was not true. There had been that some not as much. But now it seemed that all the gay male painters his age were reacting to some sort of hyper conservative frequency that only they could hear, and that their chief means of combating this projected ghost of conservatism was to paint men they thought were hot or beautiful or whatever. It was so tedious. And yet Wyeth thought about texting Keating and saying that he was serious about painting him. Not because he was attractive, though this was important naturally, but because Wyeth felt that he could do something with him. He wanted to paint Keating. He wanted also not to inspect his desire to paint Keating too closely, partly because he was afraid he would find a set of shallow motivations, partly because he was afraid he would find that he was motivated by a set of relations he could not escape, chief among which was a black faggot's tendency to want to make art about white men he desired sexually. It would have been more interesting, Wyeth thought, to try to paint Keating from memory, from the memory of last night, and to let the natural haziness of memory do its work. But then that was Proust also the priest thing, the Jesuit thing. Wyeth was not sure, strictly speaking, that he had not committed some sort of spiritual crime. Was there a special punishment for sleeping with someone who had taken vows? Was that not one of the graver spiritual infractions? He did not text. He went back to his Internet search.
- [24:14]
Interviewer
Thank you so Much. It was beautifully read, and it gets to so many of the big questions in this novel, and wonderful to hear it and your voice. But I wonder if you would talk a little bit about how you think through in the novel. The. The nature of wanting to avoid the constraints of representation and the. The. What seems to be the forcing of hands to have particular contexts, particular aesthetics, especially for black artists, and to. And to have the conflict then being that there is always the lurking sense of objectification and violence in any representation of blackness in a. In a contemporary context.
- [25:06]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah, I mean, it's. It's one of the great inescapable double binds, I think. I think for many black artists, not just in visual arts, but also in prose and cinema and film, at least in this country. I can't speak for other countries, but to create art as a black person in America is to have an audience that arrives sort of already imagining that they know what it's about. They already have in their mind what is or what is and is not acceptable, what is, what does and does not constitute black art. And they measure you against that. And that is a set of, you know, measurements that have virtually nothing to do with the artistic quality of the work itself. It's. It's like you're being measured, you know, against some external standard of, like, blackness. And if you deviate too much in either direction, you're. You're sort of chastised for it. Right. And one of the, you know, like, one of the. The sort of black critics favorite, you know, lashings to give a black artist is, oh, they made that for white people without asking themselves, like, what does it mean to sort of make art for black people consciously? And, like, what is at the heart of that impulse, which is ultimately, like, what I think, like, this book is about, like, this question of, like, does a black artist just get to be an artist? Do they get to just make art? And what motivates them to ask that question in the first place? Like, the. The. The book sort of starts peeling the onion. And Wyeth, you know, he starts out being like, I just want to paint my Rome movies with black people. What' bad about that? And the book kind of makes him interrogate, well, sure, it's fine if you want to do that, but also, why do you want to do that? You know, like, what's that about? Are you so sure that you have purely aesthetic motivations? Is there some embarrassment about your race or embarrassment about your class or embarrassment about identity? Why do you run from identity so much? And I Think in a way. Like, the book was my attempt to think through my own sort of queasy, ambivalent feelings about identity and how identity enters so much into discussions of black art in a way that, like, I mean, it also enters into discussion of, like, white art, but not in this way that feels incredibly limiting to them. And it takes up so much headspace. Right. And I just, like, I don't know, I wanted to capture that. I wanted to dramatize that. I wanted to move that to the front of the discussion and just show, like, there's actually no. There are no noble, purely noble ways to ask this question. There are. There is no sort of, like, purely noble way to make art from an identitarian basis, even if you tell yourself you're doing it for your people. Like.
- [28:00]
Interviewer
Like what?
- [28:01]
Brandon Taylor
Like, what does it mean to be, quote, unquote, doing it for your people? And why might you be doing that? You know, like, you've bought into that ideology, but, like, what is at the bottom of that ideology.
- [28:11]
Interviewer
Right.
- [28:11]
Brandon Taylor
And so the book tries to dramatize all of this, but mostly it's me giving Wyeth a hard time about the things that he finds comfort in and to sort of force him to talk some of this stuff out, and not just with white people, but to sort of force him to talk it out with other black artists as well, people who know as much as he does, and to not let him rely on his, like, erudition. Right. Like. Like, he can't be elegant. He can't. Elegance his way around some of these, like, thorny questions for which there are no easy or comforting resolutions.
- [28:45]
Interviewer
Yeah, I. And. And I love that as. As, you know, one of the major takeaways. No, no easy solutions, no easy answers. And there's, of course, the identitarian aspect. Identitarian aspect, but also, you know, a political aspect in an age of just the repetition of historical kinds of state violence against black bodies. And I was struck by, you know, when I was studying South African literature in graduate school, I read the writer Njibulu Andebele, who wrote a kind of manifesto for recovering of the ordinary in black life and black art. And his argument was that the very representation of ordinary acts of joy and sorrow and boredom was itself political. And this was obviously controversial, to say the least, given the political weight applied to works during late apartheid. And I wondered how you. You think the novel is engaging with that political. Not requirement, but certainly an onus to address the. That we're in a time of great violence, state violence against black Black lives.
- [30:01]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there is a different. And I. I've written a little bit about this, but there was a. A different opening to the novel that was much more like, insane. And Wyeth outside of a bar, watching a rat drag another rat, some across a thing. And it's, you know, like, that scene appears later in the book in a very different form. But it used to be the start of the book. And I thought, okay, but, like, 2022 was a very tense and nervy time in America, right? How am I, like, why am I being so hazy about what was on everybody's mind? And if you were out in the street in June, you were seeing the protests, you were seeing people marching because of the overturn. Overturning of Roe. And, like, it just seemed to me like if I was going to write this book and write it honestly and write it sort of close to the ground, the book had to be able to capture not just, like, one person's, like, experience, but to sort of be able to say that that person's experience is unfolding in this larger context. And part of why his experience is important is because it. It unfolds as part of everyone else's experience. And you've got to put the political back in there, right?
- [31:15]
Interviewer
And.
- [31:15]
Brandon Taylor
And so, like, it sort of found its way into the opening of the book, and that's why it sort of begins in that sort of, like, grand Dickensian way. But I also think, like, this is something that Wyeth himself thinks quite a lot about when he's wanting to paint black people in, you know, like, Romero movies or Pilat movies or Visconti movies. He's, like, painting people, black people, into, like, really gorgeous apartments, right? He's sort of painting them in these. These tableaux. And part of why he wants to paint them in these tableau, his sort of unexamined desire to do it is that he watches a lot of European film. And, like, that is. Those are the settings that his imagination is furnished by. And he feels a bit of, like, delightful. He feels a frisson when he sort of puts black people into settings that, you know, where they don't belong. And I myself have experienced things like that where, when I was in graduate school, school, my classmates told me that they wanted to know that my characters were black on the first page. And I was like, well, they are black. I can tell that they're black from the first page. I'm just, like, writing, you know, and. And I had sort of trained myself to write Stories based on Anne Beatty and Cheever and Carver and. And Richard Yates. And. And so I was just like, well, I'm just, like, putting black people in these settings, and you're telling me that you can't parse their black. Like, what? Like, that feels like a you problem. So I started, you know, I. I started calling my black characters by these intensely Slavic, Eastern European names so that if my classmates wanted to tell me that those names are inappropriate, they'd have to, like, tell me why they didn't think a black person could be called Vod. Like, what. Like, why. Why can't I call this black boy Fyodor?
- [32:56]
Interviewer
Like.
- [32:57]
Brandon Taylor
Like, you have to say that. You have to, like, use your human mouth to say to me that you don't think black people can be called that. And. And so, like, I. I sort of took that and. And gave it to Wyeth, where he's, like, painting these black people into settings that other people think are incongruous while his classmates are making art about the murder of Tamir Rice and Mike Brown and. And Trevonte Martin, like. Like. And Trayvon Martin, like. Like, they're making this, like, clearly, legibly political art. And he's, like, making, like, beautiful fantasias. And they're like, what are you doing over there? Why are you doing that? Why are you doing that? And his. His other classmates are like, well, he's just painting black people, so he's doing the same thing as them. And. And for Wyeth, he's like, no, I'm just, like, heeding my own subjectivity. But he doesn't even realize the ways that his. That. That subjectivity is, in fact, like, deeply politicized. Like, what it. Like, why are you so uncomfortable with their expression of political identity and urgency through their art? Like, why does that make you so uncomfortable? And so he spends basically the whole book trying to figure out, like, why did I feel so weird about their paintings and why did I feel kind of insulted when people said that I was being political? And the book opens with him being like, maybe I should be political. And all of his, like, downtown gay artist friends are like, brother, don't do that. Don't do that.
- [34:20]
Interviewer
I mean, speaking of impossible and intractable questions with very long histories, Wyeth and Keating really get into it about faith and religion. And I. I think it's a. It's a vexed question as to where faith and religion live in queer literature. Not at all, because queer people are not people of faith and religion, but because we live in a Contemporary moment in which organized religion is, is often structured around its exclusion of, of queer people and, and its use of language that brings violence down upon them. And having two queer characters from very different racial and cultural backgrounds discuss religion, frankly, feels like a kind of a political act. And I wonder if you'd frame it in the, in the context of their dialogues.
- [35:15]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah, I mean, part of it is, you know, I made the choice really early on that one of them was gonna be a priest and indeed one.
- [35:23]
Interviewer
Of them Justine Fleabag and you. Yeah, I mean, he's a hot priest.
- [35:28]
Brandon Taylor
I mean, I'd always kind of been obsessed with Jesuits. Like, I, like, I have this like, long history of like getting really into Catholic business even though I'm not Catholic. I just like, I know far too much about Catholics. And so when it came time to write this book, I literally made a list of like, things I wanted to write in this book. And like, top of the list was Jesuit.
- [35:47]
Interviewer
That was number one.
- [35:49]
Brandon Taylor
Number one was Jesuit. Number two was Painter and, and in some ways like Keating. Keating was like the first character I, I, I had in the book.
- [35:57]
Interviewer
But, but I always, I've always also thought that like, the Jesuits are such an interesting anomaly in the history of Catholicism and thousand percent, their desire to just have these kinds of debates and intellectual engagements seems to go at odds with the rest of the church.
- [36:17]
Brandon Taylor
Well, and very often Jesuits were oppressed. Right. And I had a conversation with a Catholic priest about, because once he found out that I was like really into Jesuits, we had like long conversations about Jesuits in the Thirty Years War. And what he told me was that a lot of the, a lot of the sort of like legal foundation that would later be marshaled against Jews and Germany and in France was first put into place as anti Jesuitical laws.
- [36:47]
Interviewer
Oh my God. Oh, wow.
- [36:48]
Brandon Taylor
You know, it's like this like, group of hyper educated outsiders who are beholden to a mysterious delocal, like mysterious foreign power. The, you know, the pa, The Pope, who like crop up and indoctrinate children and like educate them and sort of move about in the sort of unruly underclasses. And so a lot of like, you know, a lot of monarchies were not a fan. They were not. They were not a fan. And so a lot of, yeah, like the Jesuits were in fact like a sort of very not, I mean, they were oppressed in some places, but they were persecuted. And, and part of it is because they, they were, you know, they were basically the hippies. They were the sort of philosophy professors of the of the Catholic Church for a while. And so I wanted there to be a Jesuit in the book. But like once you make that choice, then you have this other choice of like, well, they're going to talk about it. Are they going to talk about God or are they not going to talk about God? I think in a lot of writers hands, especially my fellow millennials, I think there would have, the Jesuit would have been there for like seasoning, but like, it wouldn't have become like a, like a topic really. But it felt important that they talk about it and it felt important that, that it become a thing like a sort of act of texture in the book. And so they have to talk about God and they have to talk about, you know, like Keating's beliefs. Right. And, and I, at a certain point I was like, well, he's like a, he's like a Jesuit. He's like, probably like he's pro life. Like, I can't have him be like a sort of fantastical secular Jesuit. Like he, there are certain sort of non negotiables. And so then I was like, well, you know, this is a thing on which they like both disagree about and, and so like that becomes a part of the conversation. But I, I, everything that I was like afraid of, like everything that I thought would shut the book down only like deepened it. So like them getting to these intractable spaces over, over sex, over faith, over bodily autonomy, like those are just like, I was so afraid of them talking about abortion, which is a part of the book. And yet it just like became this, I don't know, like this site in the book where something, something like grace enters in and where their conversation deepens and it deepens the book in all of these other mysterious ways. And so I thought, wow, maybe people really should talk more. Like, maybe they should. Maybe dialogue is occasionally a useful way to add meaning to one's life.
- [39:20]
Interviewer
I don't know, it's fallen quite out.
- [39:22]
Brandon Taylor
Of favor, I'm afraid, and doesn't look, it's coming back. Doesn't seem like it's on its, on its way back to us.
- [39:30]
Interviewer
No, but maybe, I know maybe you can, you can make it hot again. You, you invest a great deal of your writing beauty in, in the representation of processes for restoring art, even as the novel raises the question of whether or not restoration gets to be a proper art form to begin with. And I wonder what drove your interest in, in restoration just in general, but also in representing its craft and art.
- [40:00]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah, so I, I mean a couple of things very, very Many years ago, when I had first signed with my literary agent, I was at an MFA program. And I was, like, very confused and very sad. And she came to visit the program to give a talk and I was like, like, Meredith, can you just, like, tell me what I'm good at? Can you just, like, tell me what my deal is? Like, I don't. I feel very confused and very lost and I can't see. See myself in these glasses. Like, can you just, like, tell me up from down? And she, like, very, you know, she like, blots the. Very elegantly wipes her. Her lips with her napkin and she says, oh, Brandon, like, you make process a plot. Like you. You write about process. Like, that's what you do. You seem to really delight in process. And I thought, you know what?
- [40:37]
Interviewer
That's so true in the science of, of real life. That's so true.
- [40:43]
Brandon Taylor
And the dancers and the. Like, I, yeah, yeah, I love a process. And that was just, like, very clarifying. And so I thought instead of running away from that, I'm just gonna, like, lean into it. And I. When I was like, researching for this book, I. I asked myself, like, what do I wanna write about? And I was like, yeah, I'm gonna write some painting stuff. But, like, what else am I really interested in? And I'm like, I'm really interested in how they clean paintings. I'm obsessed with how they clean them, how they clean paper. There's a shocking amount of water involved in cleaning paintings. Did you know this? They, like, they like.
- [41:17]
Interviewer
I've seen video where it's like, you're shooting water on the paintings. Yeah.
- [41:22]
Brandon Taylor
And they, like, put it in baths. And I was like, that's crazy to me. I have to know everything about it. And more or less at the same time, I discovered that I also discovered because I was like, trying to figure out an art form for Del woods to be. To be doing. And I discovered lithography. And one of my favorite painters is Helen Frankenthaler. And she did a lot of lithography that people don't really know or don't really think much about. And. And so I thought, oh, lithography and, and restoration are both, like, incredibly interesting processes. And so for me, if the process is interesting, I'm going to write all about it. I'm going to get in there. I'm gonna. I'm gonna like, yes, like, oh, you're dumping graded eraser on this. Like, who knew that that's a thing people did? It was amazing. Just the material, plus it was A way. I mean, honestly, the sort of. The sort of writing craft problem that having process solves, especially like with restoration, is that it keeps you from getting too metaphorical, right? Like, it's really easy when you're writing about something like restoration to get swept up in the. The sort of, like, figurative language of it all, but also the abstraction of it. Like, ah, yes, I am excavating the past and restoring the thing to what it once was and like, all of that stuff. And you can avoid that by just dealing directly with the materiality of the process. And so instead of writing this, like, exegesis on like, like restoration and like Christ and all this other stuff, it becomes like Wyeth rubbing graded eraser on various grades of paper and dipping it into various bats, right? And just like, making that process as interesting and as beautiful as I possibly could, just so that I wouldn't spend all of this energy being metaphorical or lyric, where it's really about the rubbing of the eraser. Because the thing is, like, if your mind wanders while you're rubbing that eraser, you're gonna, like, ruin a very painting. That's it, right? Like that. Like, when you're doing that kind of work, you're, like, zoned in. You're like. It's very Zen, it's very. Your mind is very still. But, like, you're not thinking about. Ah, yes. You're not thinking these like, rhapsodic terms, right? And so it was a nice way to keep myself grounded. And I. And I. And also just like, love going deep on a process. Like it. I find it fascinating. I love it. I can't.
- [43:46]
Interviewer
Reading about the process, I did it, like, deep dive into, like, 20th century lithography, and particularly among, you know, black artists. And there's such incredible stuff out there.
- [44:00]
Brandon Taylor
No, it's amazing. And what I will also say is that I was doing research and I found out because I was like, gonna go try to take a lithography class. And one of the sort of, like, last masters of, like, the lithographic process in America was this black man living in New York City who had a studio like, three blocks from my house, like three blocks from my apartment. And I. I was just like, this is crazy. I have to know everything about this, right? And, you know, he'd, like, studied in the Southwest, where there was a big lithography hub in America. And he had studied abroad in Paris. And he was truly, like, one of the last, like, masters. Like, he had. He had worked with Frankenthaler. He had worked with all of these people making their prints for them, and he had a studio literally, like, three, four blocks from where I live right now. And that's amazing. And, like, that's the kind of feeling I wanted the book to have, which is like, the sort of uncanny proximity between the present and the past and how it's always kind of there, you know, like, you, you, like, look at a picture like, like an old photo. Like, I, I recently saw, like, an old photo of, of like, East 60th street, and I was like, oh, my God, I play tennis there every day. That's so crazy. Like, that's the place. I, I, I, I know that place because I go there every day. And, and I don't know, like, that, that, to me, that sort of feeling of, of palimpsest, right? Of, of different temporalities on top of each other, I think, like, that's one of the things that the novel can do so beautifully. It can evoke that so strikingly and so strongly. And, and I wanted that feeling in the book somehow of, like, the sort of, like, oh, my God, this guy. But also, he, his proximity to me is so high. Like, oh, my gosh, he's. I could reach out and touch him even though he's, like, many decades gone.
- [45:42]
Interviewer
Right. That's a beautiful way of thinking about history and, and the novel. And I also just want to say that you, you're doing something different with your depiction of the city. I was, I was struck by even just a scene with Wyeth and Keating in Sheep in Sheep Meadow and looking at volleyball players and your, your kind of layering of New York City life, I feel like, is working with the city in a different way than a lot of New York City novels are doing. And it, it just, it felt very true to you and, and to your experiences as, as a human in the city. And I wonder how you brought your New York into those scenes.
- [46:28]
Brandon Taylor
Oh, that's so, that's so kind of you. And thank you so much for saying that. It means a lot to me. And, you know, there are a couple, like, really wonderful conversations with my editor about this, where he wanted me to scale back on the subway or to scale back on certain moments where he felt like, do we need to momentarily enter the consciousness of the ladies selling candy and mango on the, on the subway platforms? And I thought, no, we absolutely need to. Right. Like, part of the book's democratic project, right, Is this dispersal of, of focus. Like, it's, it's so deeply important that Wyeth on the Platform looks at those women and thinks about how they got there to such a degree that the novel enters into their experience and identifies with them so that he is no longer the center of it, but like, they are. And that the book occasionally can, can, like, see everybody in the city. And there are these moments, right, where there, there's descriptions of unhoused people in various places who have their own lives unfolding. And it feels important that the book be able to leave Wyeth and go identify very deeply with those people so that you get a sense of the city not from, not just from, like, this person's eyes. You know, he's the main character, surely, but, you know, he's a transplant, right? He, he lives in the city among people, right? And, and so, like, it was just, like, important that the book be that it take place in the city. And, and, and I mean that in, like, so many. I mean that in, like, all the ways, not just like the city is, like, an inert backdrop, but that the city has people in it, and when he looks at them, they see him back and that he can see them. And there's this negotiation that the book, it's almost like the book is, like, almost gonna tip into their perspective momentarily, and then it sort of goes on.
- [48:23]
Interviewer
Right?
- [48:24]
Brandon Taylor
And that was always, I don't know, like, I love that feeling. I love that feeling of, like, not knowing if one of these random characters on the street is gonna, like, take the book from the main character. I, I, I don't know. I sort of love books like that. Zola does that all the time where, like, oh, yes.
- [48:41]
Interviewer
Yeah.
- [48:41]
Brandon Taylor
Like, those books will follow a random stranger down any sort of nook and cranny and I don't know. And just, like, as far as the city, like, I was like, if it's going to be New York, it's got to be New York. Like, it's gotta be New York. And it's gotta have, like, the awe that Wyeth feels like being sort of still new to the city, the awe that he feels at the great canyons of the avenues and the cliffs of all the buildings. But it's also gotta have this kind of, like, steely New Yorkerness about it, where you keep your head down and you, like, mind your business, you know, but, but also this sort of, like, beating heart of generosity where it's like, we're all in this together somehow. And of course, the great metaphor of city life, the subway. Like, how can you, how can you not get enough sun? Like, the subway is so so central to life here.
- [49:32]
Interviewer
Yeah, it's, it's the veins of the body.
- [49:35]
Brandon Taylor
It really is. I, I'm, I'm obsessed with the subway, but also the fact that the subway is always where politicians or pundits go to tell you about their vision of the city. Like a lot of right wing people or conservatives imagine the subway as this like lawless under jungle.
- [49:56]
Interviewer
Right? Yeah, yeah, right.
- [49:58]
Brandon Taylor
And they're like, oh, it's so unsafe. Meanwhile, there are people like dancing and doing circus tricks. Like, you know, they're like, it's actually like very safe. Right. And, and, and so like whether you view the, the subway as hell or a kind of like the best of New York, because it is this like great mixing zone depends on, you know, it tells you a lot about how you view the city and, and, and what you think. And so the subway is just like such a useful figurative ready made. It contains all of these like different resonances and meanings depending on the person looking at it. And a lot goes on in the subway, frankly. Like a lot goes on down there.
- [50:35]
Interviewer
Yeah, I mean I, I have a forthcoming interview with the writer Olivia Wolfgang Smith, whose most recent book is, is Mutual Interest. And it's a, it's a turn of the 20th century historical novel. And one of her characters, who's not named as such, but who, who definitely has autism, becomes obsessed with the new. This, you know, the new subway and the subways, you know, networks and, and, and tries to ride it in its entirety when you, when you could early on every day. And there's some real sort of wonderful early subway scenes in it and it's.
- [51:15]
Brandon Taylor
Oh, I'm gonna have to check it out. Oh, I'm gonna check. That sounds so good.
- [51:18]
Interviewer
It's a great novel. I highly recommend it. But yeah, you'll, you will like it. So I know from a previous conversation that we've had that some of your first literary experiences were with romance. And you've said before that romance is able to have none of the sort of prudishness around the language of true physical intimacy that so much of, of literary fiction does. I mean, it's, it's almost become a kind of like a cliche to say that contemporary litfic is just so bad at, at sex writing and you are not. And it's interesting again and again to read your work and to see how you're trying to innovate in the ways that you can, you can talk about sex in literary fiction. And I wonder how you feel this book is moving forward. Maybe your own practice of that. Of that work.
- [52:15]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel like in some ways this book was my love letter to romances. There's one scene in particular that when I wrote it, I was like, ah, yes, I've finally written a swoon. I finally got a character to swoon. And if you've read my previous books, you know that there were no occasions for anybody to be swooning in any of those books. So it felt like. No. And so it felt like such. You know, there are all these, like, sly references to. To Meg Ryan and. And When Harry Met Sally throughout the book. Anyway, I. If my first book was like, me trying to rewrite to the Lighthouse. Like, this book was like me trying to write When Harry Met Sally. And. And that. That will make sense to. To readers when they. When they read the book. But. And so I was. I think in this book I was interested in writing about sex in a way that, like, wasn't as punishing. I feel like in my other work, sex was always. It always came at such a fraught high cost, even when it was, like, quite pleasurable. I don't know if the characters were experiencing much pleasure. And with this book, I. I feel like I just sort of entered into a different understanding of, like, what is possible between two people. And I wanted the sex to be a deepening of. A deepening of intimacy, but, like, also just like a. A deepening of intimacy that was not the foreclosure questions, but, like, opened onto new questions and let the characters ask more of each other with their bodies and also just like, letting them enjoy it. I think letting the pleasure back into the sex writing, letting the sex be warmer, be more playful, be more intimate, that was fun to do because I. I felt somehow that, like, that aspect of sex, the playfulness of it, the sort of playful curiosity of two people trying to, like, figure out, you know, like, what do I. Like, what do I like with this person? What are we gonna do next? And also, the fact that there is a relationship here in the book means that I get to show their sex and their physical intimacy evolving over the course of a novel. And there are kinds of things that I got to write in this book that I just, like, literally had no reason to write in the other ones. You know, like, there's just like. There's like, no. It's like there's no hand holding and those. No one's holding hands in those in the first three books. And so I think, yeah, like this book, I consider the book where I discovered, like, A new terrain of, like, tenderness and intimacy. And it's not that it's like a sappy book, though. There are sappy moments that I take great pride in. It's just that the characters got to like each other a little more and that the sex was less of a battleground and. And that was fun to discover. To discover that I could write that and to sort of. Because it brings its own aesthetic questions. Because it's like, you don't want to just, like. You don't just, like, want to want it to be boring or, like, gauzy and, like, tender. Like, ooh, they're so tender to each other. Like, it's gotta have some heat to it. Right? Like, you've gotta find a way to keep it interesting and sexy and. And exciting to the characters themselves. And it's not just like, oh, let's let us just, like, very tenderly brush our fingertips over each other's faces for five pages. Like, in that case, you might as.
- [55:32]
Interviewer
Well just have them, like, make each other some oatmeal.
- [55:34]
Brandon Taylor
I know. Or, like, just, like, do a fade to Black brother. Like, that's not. It's not worth it. Right? So it's gotta be. It's gotta have some physicality and interest and heat to it. And so that was a fun. That was like a fun balance. And it. Again, like, this is, like, I didn't have an occasion to ever have those thoughts with my first three books, so it was fun to discover them with this one.
- [55:58]
Interviewer
Well, and audience members who haven't read the Late Americans or Real Life will. Will discover soon enough why. Why. That is for a very good reason.
- [56:08]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, I. You know, like, I did what I needed to do with those two books, but it was nice to need to do a different thing in this one.
- [56:17]
Interviewer
Brendan, before I let you go, I'd love to know a little bit what you've been reading and loving recently. If you have any recommendations for us.
- [56:25]
Brandon Taylor
Oh, my gosh.
- [56:26]
Interviewer
You read just like a crazy person. So I'm. I'm excited.
- [56:31]
Brandon Taylor
People. People often say that. I do. I'm always like, what are you talking about? I don't read. And then I, like, look back over my, like, camera roll for the month, and I'm like, oh, I read so many books. I. So I have two kinds of Rex here. So in my sort of, like, daily life, what I'm reading for pleasure, I read a recent novel called Muscle man by Jordan Castro, and it's about a lit professor who is, like, stuck in a faculty meeting and all he wants to do is be in the gym lifting. And it's just such, it's just, it's like a Bernhardian riff on that. But it's so funny and so wise and like weirdly, weirdly very gay and like spiritually like, like active with questions of like meaning and, and, and all this other stuff. It's so good and it's so funny and it will go by really quick. So I recommend Muscle man by Jordan Castro. And then on the other side of that is like this great book called Herculine by Grace Byron which is about a trans woman in New York who goes to her ex girlfriend's a commune. And it turns out they may or may not be summoning demons. And it's again, the answer is definitely yes, 1000% they're summoning demons. But it's again, it's just like so smart and so philosophically and spiritually active, but also like irreverent and cool and it just like gets being like queer and trans in New York. It's so good. I, I love it. And then on the flip side, I, I'm. I'm teaching a class on ideology this fall in New York. The ideological basis of fiction. And the first two novels that were for that class, we're having a lot of fun. The first two novels that we're reading for that are Emile Zola's Therese Raquin and Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton. And I had forgotten how messed up those books are. They're both bonkers and so good. They're both really, really short books, but they're so good and would make like a really good prestige series but for different reasons each one. But so if you're like looking for something just like dark that's gonna make you be like sad in like a really pleasing way, like listening to like Fleet Foxes or Billie Eilish, then read Ethan Frome and Therese Retkin. They're both oh so juicy, so good.
- [58:50]
Interviewer
And I, yeah, it, that's so exciting. I, I read Ethan from ages ago, but now I have to return to it and I do like.
- [58:59]
Brandon Taylor
No, I was just gonna say like I, this is my first time reading it in like three years and oh my God, what a crazy book. I, I'd forgotten many, I had forgotten some things that key moments I had misremembered them and I'm just like, oh, this is so much more messed up than I ever. Than I remembered.
- [59:18]
Interviewer
It is, yeah, it, it in many ways defies the expectations of novels of its time. I Think. And yeah, it's. It, it is quite bizarre. And what. And wonderful and weird and. And definitely. I think it's. It's calling me back now. It's funny that you bring up. Yeah, you bring up Fleet Foxes because I think it was you on social media who was describing the adaptation of the history of sound as, as, as if some, some guys from a 1920 literary magazine were listening to Fleet Fl. Foxes. So.
- [59:53]
Brandon Taylor
Yes. Yeah. Like it. And it is like, if you ever wonder what, like Josh o', Connor, what it be like if Josh o' Connor and Paul Mescal dressed like they edited a small literary magazine and sang covers of Fleet Fox's songs, complimentary, then this is the movie for you. And I stand by that. Like it. It really is. They, they look like they edit the Drift or like Plowshares or something. Like, outfits are exquisite. And the, the, the Fleet Fox's vibes. Like the first song, one of the first songs that they sing is a cover of. Of Silver Dagger, which is of course like a folk song that Robin Pecknold covered during his, his, his era when he was promoting Shore, the Fleet Foxes album. And it's an amazing song. And Robin Pecknold of Fleet Foxes does an incredible job. And Paul Mescal also does a great job. And the minute I left that screening, I like, just like put on Robin Pecknold singing Silver Dagger all the way.
- [60:47]
Interviewer
Home from Lincoln Center. Well, can we put this as an extra recommendation for you?
- [60:54]
Brandon Taylor
Heck yeah. I, yeah, I recommend. I recommend.
- [60:57]
Interviewer
Awesome. Well, what I want to recommend most of all is the latest by an author whose work I really love and admire. And it's Minor Black Figures, a novel unafraid to have characters, have conversations about ideas with long histories and not come to consensus on those ideas, but rather find that the perhaps the hottest thing about intimacy with one another is talking about things upon which you disagree. And it was such a pleasure to get to talk to you. You're such a great interview, Brandon Taylor. And I hope we'll continue to get to talk in the future.
- [61:36]
Brandon Taylor
Yeah, I can't wait for the next one.
- [61:38]
Interviewer
Me ne. Well, that's all from me for now. My thanks to Brandon Taylor for coming on to talk about his latest novel, Minor Black Figures. You can find links to purchase Minor Black Figures and all of Brandon's recommendations On the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.