Brandon Taylor's genius

Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals is not your typical story collection. About half the stories are linked: not enough to classify it as a true linked collection like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Good Squad or Elizabeth Strout’s (wonderful) Olive books, but with too many interconnections to read as a straight story collection. Taylor could have chosen to group his connected stories together into a novella, separate from the others in the collection, a la David Gates’ A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me, but instead he chose to intermingle the two, pulling the thread of the persisting narrative through the book. The result is a feeling that we are never far away from that narrative and its concerns, and the unconnected stories serve as different lenses on the same material. This hybrid form works because all of Taylor’s stories circle around the same set of issues – loneliness and connection, race, queer identity, the overlap between sex and violence – and each story, whether linked or not, opens a different vista onto those overlapping issues.

I agree with Lucy Scholes of the UK Financial Times, who noted that “intimacy is Taylor’s great subject.” The success of Filthy Animals lies in its subtle and complex treatment of the microdynamics between people, whether strangers, new friends, or lovers. It’s a wonderfully three-dimensional exploration of real and messy intimacy and the many ways and moments in which humans thwart it. Taylor’s characters are groping in the dark for connection, trying to find it despite their all-too-relatable fears and neuroses. Even the moments of violence in the book are feathered with a kind of intimate vulnerability.

Lionel, who is the most “main” of the characters, has just been released from in-patient suicide observation, after a serious attempt the previous year and a recent relapse into suicidal ideation. I’m painfully aware, in penning that one-sentence summary, of how inadequate it is to Lionel’s actual experience. Lionel’s deep at-sea-ness, the past events that precipitated it, and his ongoing attempts to process his feelings of isolation, are so particularly Lionel. The great genius of Taylor’s book is that particularity. The effect is characters so real and alive that to try to sum up the book by describing its themes entirely misses the felt experience of reading it.

In a recent Substack post, Taylor contemplated with his usual sophistication what it means to write Black experience, musing in particular on the temptation, in the face of injustice, to write a “signifier” instead of a “singular experience”. He also lays out the difference, from Northrop Frye, between “centripetal” and “centrifugal” writing (if this scientific formulation intrigues you, as it did me, I encourage you to read Taylor’s commentary on it). Near the end of the post, Taylor expresses this desire: I just want to make something as urgent and elegant and vicious and delicate as Elaine de Kooning’s ink on acetate. De Kooning’s work (also shown in that post) is remarkable, and with Filthy Animals, Taylor is following in her footsteps.