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Summary
Summary
In the series of linked stories at the heart of Filthy Animals, set among young creatives in the American Midwest, a young man treads delicate emotional waters as he navigates a series of sexually fraught encounters with two dancers in an open relationship, forcing him to weigh his vulnerabilities against his loneliness. In other stories, a young woman battles with the cancers draining her body and her family; menacing undercurrents among a group of teenagers explode in violence on a winter night; a little girl tears through a house like a tornado, driving her babysitter to the brink; and couples feel out the jagged edges of connection, comfort, and cruelty.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Taylor follows his Booker shortlisted Real Life with a sharp, surprising collection. Many of the stories cover a 24-hour period in Madison, Wis., beginning with the excellent "Pot Luck." Lionel, an exam proctor and mathematician who is recently out of psychiatric care following a suicide attempt, goes to a dinner party and meets Charles, a dancer. A mutual attraction emerges, despite some awkwardness and the presence of Charles's partner, Sophie. "Flesh" shifts perspective to Charles in his dance class the next morning, and delineates his complex dynamic with Sophie. "Proctoring," a standout featuring Lionel at work, further complicates the triangle. As the sequence continues, supporting characters are linked by various circumstances. (The client of a young woman who works as a home cook and a babysitter in "Little Beast" turns out to be the doctor of one of Charles's dance classmates.) In the marvelous "Meat," Lionel concludes, "All of life was shifting equations." Throughout, Taylor spins intimate narratives of fraught relationship dynamics and demonstrates a keen sensitivity to his characters' fragile mental health. Taylor's language sparks with the tension of beauty and cruelty, conveying a sense of desire and the pleasures of food and sex complicated by capricious behavior. The author has an impressive range, and his depictions of complex characters trapped in untenable situations are hard to forget. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Co. (June)
Guardian Review
American author Brandon Taylor follows his Booker-shortlisted debut novel, Real Life, with an impressive collection of linked short stories, Filthy Animals. His characters, like the postgraduate student Wallace at the centre of Real Life, preserve their composure externally while they splinter internally as Taylor constantly tests the membrane that separates our interior lives from the exterior world. Taylor doesn't stray too far from the world he knows well: campuses, thesis projects, grad students who "talked about the historicity of women's diaries from the late early-modern period". He's not a young Zadie Smith, who emerged with the ability to write anybody of any age and culture. Many of his characters are queer. One of the collection's ambitions, it seems, is to smudge the line between straight and gay (another membrane) and to demonstrate how queer desire permeates various identity markers, including class. The collection begins by corralling characters at the kind of party that writers love because it sets up tensions, contrasts personalities, establishes alliances and piques dramatic irony. At this party, Lionel, a black man who has recently come out of hospital, meets Charles and Sophie, two dancers in an open relationship. Five of the 11 stories in Filthy Animals track the trio's liaisons. Taylor plays the Lionel-Charles-Sophie storyline for all its awkwardness and resentment, but it can feel like a note held too long to suspend commitment, which is the resolution we're trained to expect. The other stories rely less on recurring characters than they do on theme. A cluster in the middle share violent climactic scenes. "As Though That Were Love" is scored with horror music in its mood. It's the story where you shout: Don't go up those stairs! "Mass" will be taught on writing courses as an example of understatement. It exposes the violence men commit by the things they say, don't say and can't say. And the title story, well, there's no preparing for that. The violence is neither glamorous nor gratuitous; it is senseless without being pointless. In contrast, Taylor presents such earnest moments of vulnerability in "Anne of Cleves" that my breath hitched. I'd urge this story on anyone for the moment where a character cries out, in midwestern grammar: "Why don't anybody want me back. Why don't anyone ever want me." Some writers have the gift of perfect pitch when writing dialogue; Taylor's gift is perfect tempo. In a band of writers, he'd be the drummer who sticks to a steady moderato. He neither rushes a story to its high notes nor drags the pace so that we can admire his voice. And as a plotter, he doesn't rely on gasp-inducing reveals. Coming out is not the constant climax - the single, story-worthy moment of queer life. When he focuses on that moment, as he does for the lesbian couple in "Anne of Cleves", he does so amid corresponding issues of self-discovery, disclosure, privacy and fluidity. Taylor's superpower is compressing a lifetime of backstory into a paragraph - sometimes just a sentence. Charles remembers "being shoved into a locker by a bunch of lacrosse jerks who got drunk on their dads' boats and drowned on lazy summer nights". There's a whole unwritten story of disease and contagion buckling the ground of "As Though That Were Love". Taylor doesn't need to say much to us in these late pandemic days about the fine line between life and death (another membrane). He adroitly manipulates the forward momentum of these stories by adding weight to the past. A character's history opens like a loose parachute behind him, so that even as he tries to move forward in life, the drag of the past determines his pace. I've come to expect, in fiction, the story of the Sad Gay Youth who is rejected by his often religious family and thereafter becomes self-destructive or reckless. And while Taylor refracts versions of this story throughout the collection, he does so without overly romanticising it. No doubt, the Sad Gay Youth makes better fiction than the Gay Gay Youth. But like the tragic "mulatta" of 19th-century American literature or heroines such as Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, who are punished for having desires, the too-frequent pairing of sexuality and suffering inscribes queer life as destined for loneliness, alienation, crippling introspection and outsider status, and positions the queer subject as a perpetual object of pity. But in Taylor's case, that's more warning than criticism. He is a writer of enormous subtlety and of composure beyond his years.
Kirkus Review
A story collection full of vital insight into murky human interactions. Lionel, who animates several of the linked stories in this high-wire act of a collection, is a Black, queer graduate student at an unnamed Midwestern university--much like Wallace, the protagonist of Taylor's Booker Prize--shortlisted debut novel, Real Life (2020). He studies pure math and is recovering from a suicide attempt. At a party, he mimics other grad students' laughter because he doesn't innately feel the social cues most people would. But Lionel isn't devoid of emotion. In fact, the "feeling of falseness vibrating in his sinuses" from pretending to enjoy social events utterly wears him out. So when Lionel becomes involved with bisexual Charles and his girlfriend, Sophie, both of whom are studying dance, the frisson may be too much for him: "Some lives, Lionel thought, had to be ordinary or ugly or painful. Ending your life had to be on the table." Other stories share this rueful, sepulchral cast of mind. In "Little Beast," babysitter and private chef Sylvia knows that "the world can't abide a raw woman." In the title story, one character's "favorite act of violence is to burn holes into people's clothes when they aren't looking." The settings here are bleak--alienated suburbs; petty college campuses--and the mood unsparing. But the daring in these stories is bracing. Despite its accolades, Taylor's debut novel could feel listless; this collection is a deeper achievement. Taylor tackles a variety of taboos and articulates the comfortless sides of the soul, and it's thrilling to watch. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In the first story in this collection, Taylor introduces a trio of characters who will appear several more times. Lionel, on hiatus from his graduate program following a suicidal depression, meets dancers Charles and Sophie, whose dynamic as a couple Lionel can't quite figure out. He connects with Sophie and gives her his number, but it's Charles who shows up at his apartment that snowy night. Later, readers see Charles dancing in his "class for stragglers," despite his bum knee, and learn that his night with Lionel was more than allowed in the confines of his and Sophie's relationship, though she wants to know more than he's interested in saying about it. Readers will see all three again, and meet one of Charles' fellow straggler-dancers, along with a woman navigating her first relationship with another woman, a teenager unable to express his true affection for his best friend, and others. Contemplating the intersection of love and violence, emotional and bodily, these stunning stories showcase the sensibility displayed in Taylor's much-loved and -lauded debut, Real Life (2020).
Library Journal Review
Teenagers become violent of a winter's night, a young woman battles cancer while mourning its impact on her family, and a young man stumbles through several sexually tense encounters with two dancers in an open relationship. Featuring creative young people at odds with life, these linked stories follow Taylor's Booker Prize short-listed debut novel, Real Life.