Wyeth, the protagonist of Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures, is a painter stuck in a creative block. With each creative piece, and with each personal action, he bristles at the thought of what different folks would think of his craft, or even him. His studio companions are a chorus of opinions: on his art, on art in general, on him.
To exist in America is to swim in a concoction of surveillance and opinion—or, as Taylor might say, the discourse. Wyeth tells the reader: “The legacy of the black artist in the Western world was a kind of wrangling with the long history of subjectification and objectification.” Wyeth’s artistic block seems to come, at least in part, from these different angles—judgments from within and outside his communities that impose upon Wyeth what he should be. A white man he meets at a bar calls Wyeth “the opposite of a therapist” during an attempt at flirting—“your job is to make people want to seek a therapist.” Fellow artists tell Wyeth that the Black figures he paints over film scenes aren’t “real,” because they are superimpositions rather than more requested forms of art that center and commodify Black ecstasy or suffering. A collective of online-famous artists curates a show to which Wyeth receives an invitation via a friend—a show that hokily displays racial trauma through a common sugar daddy and his distinct apartment furniture, and a show that makes Wyeth worry that literalness and art-as-encounter are faster vehicles for success than creating art meaningful to the artist.
If to be American is to be watched—to exist in constant, simplified politics of judgment and imposition—then to be an artist in America is to sit beneath a million lenses, while trying to make sense of it all—while not being crushed into joining those unsophisticated politics. Wyeth not only feels those lenses, but imagines and reheats them, living in a paralyzing chamber of other people’s perceived opinions—the discourse. He has, he tells the reader, “the eyes of the world.”
Then, Wyeth has sex with a priest. Shortly afterward, Wyeth and that priest kiss outside the door of Wyeth’s studio. They hear his studio partners shuffling around, staring at them from behind a peephole. It’s the first time Wyeth is watched and doesn’t mind. The discourse stops, if only for a moment.
I won’t spoil beyond that moment—that’s all from only the first act of the book—but I will say that there is a reason every new Brandon Taylor book is a major literary occasion. So much of Minor Black Figures defies summary, and that’s intentional. Nothing in the book is simple. Taylor tackles politics, love, religion, and the New York City art world with a depth of complication that still feels incisive. Minor Black Figures is the perfect follow-up to Taylor’s The Late Americans (2023) and Real Life (2020), because every Brandon Taylor character is a complex mess in the best possible way. Wyeth continues Taylor’s legacy of these characters, but with an even more refined—and often, even more crushing—lens. And through this lens, Taylor forges perhaps the most compelling story of life under the weight of opinion and perception that I’ve read.
Taylor has joked on social media that this is the book that will get him cancelled—there are meditations on the discourse, of course, and also family (Wyeth’s mother has left him behind for newer, whiter kids), sex life (Wyeth hooks up with a new man for the first time in a while, and his friends sure do have opinions about that!), and art (queer men clamor for more beauty, more nudity, more penises!)—but I think it will do the opposite. Taylor tells a story about appreciating complexity—of curiosity and examination—rather than echoing an opinion and covering one’s eyes. While the world buzzes with opinions louder and simpler by the day, Minor Black Figures—like much of Taylor’s best work—encourages introspection, understanding, and an appreciation of intricacy. The world is here, Taylor shows us—sophisticated, difficult, and gorgeous—as long as you’re willing to look at it for more than a few seconds.
FICTION
By Brandon Taylor
Riverhead Books
Published October 14, 2025
