MINOR BLACK FIGURES, by Brandon Taylor
Midway through “Minor Black Figures,” Brandon Taylor stages an impromptu screening of Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” The 1975 Belgian drama, named the greatest film of all time by Sight and Sound magazine in 2022, depicts three days in the life of a widowed housewife over a 201-minute running time. In their downtown Manhattan studio, three queer, 30-something artists gather around the screen to watch, along with one of the men’s newest hookups, a former Catholic priest named Keating. They’re left rapt and teary until “Jeanne Dielman” ends — at which point, naturally, the guys want to know what Keating thinks.
“You spend all this time with this woman, and it feels … earned?” Keating says. “Somehow you live the time with her, so you feel so close to her in the end. Because you’ve been in it with her.”
That Taylor achieves a similar verisimilitude with his new novel is no small feat. Paced to the languid, sticky rhythms of a New York summer, “Minor Black Figures” tracks Wyeth, a 31-year-old painter living on the Upper East Side. We observe him taking on odd jobs for a gallerist and an art restorer; follow him on afternoon runs through Central Park; accompany him on midnight hunts for ice-cream sandwiches; feel the instant heat that rises when he meets the mysterious blond-haired Keating at a West Village bar. Also, we join him on cigarette breaks. So many cigarette breaks.
Beginning in art school, Wyeth developed a passion for painting Black people into transposed moments from bourgeois 20th-century cinema. In 2020, he went viral for recreating a spiritual scene from Ingmar Bergman’s 1963 tragedy, “Winter Light,” with two Black fishermen wearing “contemporary streetwear.” The internet interpreted the visual as a profound commentary on the murder of George Floyd; Wyeth did not intend to stoke any kind of political reaction. He discovered he had “back-doored his way into a dead Black boy painting,” his piece’s gentle intimacy overpowered by the social-media discourse machine. We meet a disillusioned Wyeth two years later, trying to craft paintings out of photos he took at a protest after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He’s on a desperate quest to conjure a sense of “real life” in his art.
“Real Life” is, relatedly, the title of Taylor’s 2020 debut novel, a Booker Prize finalist — and however abstract, the concept remains an obvious priority in the author’s own fiction. In his work, Taylor has detailed the grind of a hospice-care shift, the power politics of a niche academic landscape, the microscopic focus required for restoring a forgotten Black artist’s work. This extends to the bedroom: Taylor ranks among our most gifted writers of gay sex, down to recurring inspections of penile hygiene. Wyeth and Keating’s first encounter winds toward a release as graphic as it is moving, one that “had a tingling aftermath like epiphany.” Plus, it’s sexy as hell.
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