I was once a starving art student, working temp jobs, babysitting, and selling my plasma to buy the film I needed to create my graduate opus. All I’d need these days is a computer. But I’m Gen X, and we didn’t have such things back then.

So it is both a surprise and a relief that in Brandon Taylor’s THE LATE AMERICANS, a collection of interwoven stories about young artists on campus, the students are still starving. And complaining. And trying to figure out if what they have to say is indeed worth putting pen to paper, or brush to canvas, or muscled leg to pas de bourree. Taylor’s whiny and oversexed social justice warriors and their victims are a very vocal, cacophonous chorus of searchers, and they are deeply American, no matter where they come from.

"Although not a beach read, THE LATE AMERICANS is made for slow reading on hot days when you want to delve into how much things have changed for young people figuring out their way in the world --- and how much, unfortunately, has stayed the same."

Taylor attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and most of the action revolves around the University of Iowa’s campus. There are poets, of varying sexual identities, who create a war in a seminar that brings up a lot of gendered divisions between the students. Some are quite young, while others are old enough to know better. Most of the main characters are young men trying to write honestly about the world and not just live in their own minds. They fight, kiss and mate with a ferocious quality that separates them from the women they know who are vociferously up in arms about the way men attribute their very worth to their bodies.

There is a lot of body focus in these stories --- the way that bodies move through space, in sexual encounters, and how people sit in their seats during seminars or at a town bar. These individuals are searching for their very souls, armed with a good kick step or some fancy words and their own self-importance.

Taylor’s characters appear to be in a constant state of provocation --- men arguing about whether a friend’s attempts to make money on OnlyFans is brave or stupid, or whether the mean girls in the seminar are unfair or fair in their judgment of those who are stuck in their childish versions of masculinity. He writes these encounters in a very poetic manner; it is important to him to find new ways to describe everything from oral sex to the loose petals of flowers as they fly through the wind. It is a celebration of wordsmithing that at times feels student-like.

Taylor seems to be writing in a style that befits his ascending artists. Or is he still trying to impress the reader? The latter seems unlikely. He has enjoyed enormous success since the release of his debut novel, REAL LIFE, which was shortlisted for both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The interrelated adventures of the community that make up the book is a worthwhile attempt at discovering the topics that create intimacy and enmity, tossing this generation into a tizzy at every turn. It also is a compelling attempt at sizing up the state of the world and of the arts during this crazy time.

Although not a beach read, THE LATE AMERICANS is made for slow reading on hot days when you want to delve into how much things have changed for young people figuring out their way in the world --- and how much, unfortunately, has stayed the same.