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A Novel
by Brandon Taylor
Book Reviewed by:From the Booker Prize finalist and bestselling author: a perceptive novel about a gay Black painter navigating the worlds of art, desire, and creativity.
A newcomer to New York, Wyeth is a Black painter who grew up in the South and is trying to find his place in the contemporary Manhattan art scene. It's challenging. Gallery shows displaying bad art. Pretentious artists jockeying for attention. The gossip and the backstabbing. While his part-time work for an art restorer is engaging, Wyeth suffers from artist's block with his painting and he is finding it increasingly difficult to spark his creativity. When he meets Keating, a white former seminarian who left the priesthood, Wyeth begins to reconsider how to observe the world, in the process facing questions about the conflicts between Black and white art, the white gaze on the Black body, and the compromises we make – in art and in life.
As he did so adeptly in Booker finalist Real Life and the bestselling The Late Americans, Brandon Taylor brings to life in Minor Black Figures a fascinating set of characters, this time in the competitive art world, and the lives they lead with each and on their own. Minor Black Figures is an involving and tender portrait of friendship, creativity, and the connections between them.
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (11/27/2025)
I'm reading Minor Black Figures by Brandon Taylor. It's an interesting novel about Wyeth, who has finished his MFA and has hit a creativeblock. He's trying to make a living until he can find a way ba...
-Ann_S
The heart of Brandon Taylor's novel is the city of New York. The fruit vendors and the homeless sleepers and the rush hour subway riders. And the solitary gay men who disappear inside the boisterous neighborhoods. The characters of Keating and Wyeth are anecdotal. They are both lost in what should have been perfect careers and their anxieties are shockingly compatible. This isn't a story for everyone. It's not one of those take it on vacation and read it on the plane books. The writing is dense and literary and the plotting quite narrow. The prose is what gives the story wings even with its thin plot and examination of black loneliness and creative struggle...continued
Full Review
(1170 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
The half-century-old painting of a young child is owned by a Houston family who wants it restored to its original beauty. It is the job of Olin-Noah Venderhaven and his crew of assistants, Chloé and Wyeth, to manage the project. After the painting is de-aged, once the old varnish, debris, and residual dirt and dust are erased, what fills the room is a noxious nicotine scent. Over the years, cigarette smoke has seeped into the canvas and the smell that remains is suffocating. Wyeth, the lowest in grade of the assistants and a struggling painter, wonders why Venderhaven would take on such a marginal painting. He can't understand wasting time on something so average. In his mind, art restoration should be reserved for elite paintings,...
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