Brandon Taylor’s third novel, Minor Black Figures, follows a young Black painter named Wyeth in New York after a pandemic. The book is dense with ideas about Black art and aesthetics, but its language is often clumsy and academic, failing to bring the concepts to life.
Wyeth, born in Virginia to a white mother and raised in a trailer park, feels isolated by his working-class, fatherless background. In New York, he works at a gallery and as an art restorer, but his own small-scale paintings—which replace white characters in European auteur films with Black figures—are criticised as mere thought experiments or bourgeois desires for Black ease.
The novel is packed with Wyeth’s thoughts on Black art, including takedowns of “diasporic grifters” and critiques of artists like Kehinde Wiley. Taylor echoes arguments from critic Rachel Hunter Himes about the danger of reducing Black art to “urgent, relevant, and timely” labels. However, the language used to explore these issues is often crabbed and inert, reminiscent of academic conferences.
Wyeth himself is exhausting and cynical, with observations about New York that are either hackneyed or overly fastidious. It is unclear whether Taylor is satirising his protagonist or revealing his own stylistic flaws. Supporting characters, who might have balanced Wyeth’s stiltedness, are portrayed in a slapdash manner.
