Staff Picks: Biopics, Blades, and Balloons
Brandon Taylor. Photo: Bill Adams.
David Ferry’s poem “” has its narrator considering a family portrait taken a year before he was born. He knows everyone in the photo, and yet it is “of no country I know.” Over and over again, I tried to picture the lakefront in Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, —I who toured endless college campuses, lived on several, visited friends on still more, I who am white and have lived in majority-white communities for deep decades at a time. In the descriptions of this life with which I am so familiar, I both recognized and didn’t recognize the world displayed, so fresh and asks questions many of us shy from: Who is entitled to pain? How useful is an apology? Can sharing our feelings free us from them? How much is empathy? Taylor is a student of the Master, and at times fire catches the taut laces of dinner-table talk as in any Jamesian parlor. Taylor isn’t above a bit of play: a life preserver becomes an erotic harness, nacho cheese becomes sexual effluvia—or does it? If there was as much attention paid to good writing about sex as there is to bad sex writing, Taylor would sweep the top prize. Amid the flurry of new novels drifting down like so many balloons, is the one weighted with confetti, each flake moving at half speed, a silicon membrane away from free fall.
