BOOK BLOG #7
I recommend 2 brand NEW books; DISTRACTION CORNER; minor ramblings. Bring back FABIO!
Heart the Lover by Lily King (2025)
With her latest book, Lily King delivers a work of true tenderness. Prepare to cry upon finishing this novel (or sob on a plane, as I did). It’s an honor to be moved by words, and an amazing feat for an author to capture the ambivalence of love.
I like to think that there must be infinite worlds out there. After a close friend of mine died in 2024, I found myself dwelling overmuch on this idea. There is a world in which my friend is still alive; that world is a pleasant one to contemplate. There is a world too where you are with your first love. A world in which the decisions of your callow youth stuck. King imagines a world where, decades after a love story has come to an uneasy close, the main character is able to grapple with what might have been.
The book is in two parts: the first is the college novel, the story of young love. The main character begins dating one intense man, but ends up falling for his roommate. She is introduced by the both of them to an intellectual life that she was unable to access before in her rote co-ed existence. They dub her Jordan (à la Jordan Baker from the Great Gatsby). She begins to imagine more for herself. She goes to France to work as an au-pair. A misunderstanding occurs; expectations are dashed. The book is set in the 80s, and the lack of the immediacy of cell phones meant that the misunderstandings that ensued had finality in a way that feels almost totally un-relatable now.
The second part of the book jumps forward in time: the heroine, unnamed until the very end, is a mother of two. Living in Maine, she is married to a man named Silas; Silas is not either one of her college loves. She is a writer, a trope I am very fond of (when writers write writers). It is into this established landscape her college love reemerges, and they are able to explore most poignantly their lost relationship. But the timing is bad; her young love is hospitalized just as her own son has been approved for a life-saving surgery. There is still never enough time, King reminds us. (I think of Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening”: “O let not Time deceive you,/ You cannot conquer Time.”)
The gimmick of the main character’s namelessness I enjoyed; we are flowing inside her unnamed consciousness, we are boundless in her thoughts, and her name is immaterial. Only at the very end is her name revealed. And as the book ends, she is named, and we are ejected.
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor (2025)
Brandon Taylor grew up reading romance novels. I’m guessing that he, like me, also grew up with Fabio’s turgid abdominals displayed prominently in grocery store checkout aisles. (Every time I’m at the grocery store I wish there were still these salacious romance novel covers out on display. What happened to them??) Minor Black Figures is a romance novel, in the most interesting way. It chronicles the beginning of a relationship between a painter, aptly named Wyeth, and an ex-Jesuit seminarian named Keating. The sex scenes are sweet; they are additive to the plot, but the sex is not the denouement. (This is one thing I always find so devastatingly boring in actual romance novels, along with the inevitability of the two characters getting together…. god, it’s so boring and depressing!! Minor Black Figures is a romance novel that avoids these two problems.)
Minor Black Figures is quite dense. Unlike a book like Heart the Lover, which dives over decades and distills the feelings of young love over time, Minor Black Figures is a slice of the main character’s life and inner workings in detail. Anyone who reads Brandon Taylor’s Substack might recognize the relentless inquiry of Minor Black Figures’ Wyeth in Taylor’s prolific essays and literary criticism. There are several moments when Keating prompts Wyeth to the effect of “I think you think too much.” This is perhaps the world to Brandon Taylor. But it is also a recognizable conversation between anyone who has a loud internal monologue and themselves.
I listened to a fascinating interview with Taylor on the New York Times Book Review Podcast, where he talks about the erstwhile “social novel” and how American fiction of the last few decades has closed in: sometimes it’s just about one person, and loneliness is a more pervasive theme than ever before. (I loved his thoughts about form, and I have the agree: the current popular American novel has gone deep inside the psyche; there are often few characters, the character is isolated, on a hero journey that is internal as much as anything. The hero is lonely, sometimes friendless.)
The scope of Minor Black Figures is perfection; although Wyeth exists without the intrusion of family or any childhood remnants except his memories and as such is somewhat of a lonely hero, he exists in multiple universes: at his two jobs, with a cast of supporting characters at both; at his studio, with his studio mates; and alone in his small fifth-floor walk-up studio where he watches old movies. At his restoration job, he chases down information about an elusive Black artist active in decades previous. At his gallery job, he ponders advances from a popular artists collective whose work he hates. At his own studio, he agonizes over whether a Black artist can make work that is not viewed as political and whether he can even move through his creative block to make anything at all. In his personal life, he explores his relationship with Keating.
Taylor is consciously worked towards a larger scale than he has in his earlier books, quite effectively. He has some grandiose imagery at the beginning of a couple chapters, but what is more moving to me than that kind of Dickensian verbosity is how he delves into the side characters meaningfully and how busy, literally and figuratively, Wyeth’s world is. Wyeth exists in different plots, and all of them are deeply engaging; the mystery of his work at the restoration business, his own search for meaning in his art and exploration with the commercial aspect of creating art, and of course his thoughtful relationship with Keating, who, if less busy outwardly, is easily his match in depth. Both Wyeth and Keating are in the throes of separate existential crises; Wyeth because of his art, Keating because of his faith. Throughout the book, Wyeth and all his aspects are a beautiful vehicle for a series of lofty philosophical treatises, and I don’t mind at all.
DISTRACTION CORNER
Podcast: Zadie Smith on the New Yorker Radio Hour. She talks about her new book of essays and the idiocy of “write what you know.”
TV: The fifth season of Slow Horses came to an end on AppleTV last night. Faithfully adapted from Mick Herron’s series of the same name, the show is SO DELICIOUS if you’re like me and love a mystery, especially one with a cast of disgraced losers and boozers.
Music: Friendship’s amazing 2025 album Caveman Wakes Up has been a staple for me over the last month.