PositiveThe Wall Street JournalThe young people of The Late Americans, which is set in and around the University of Iowa, have something spiky and wounded about them ... Though it’s called a novel, this book works like a series of linked stories. Seamus gets the most pages, but he is only one of many moons and satellites—a whirling collection of students, friends, rivals and lovers—who orbit the Iowa campus and each other ... Like a voyeuristic astronomer, the reader tracks their courses with guilty fascination, waiting to see who betrays whom, and how; and wondering how each impact might affect the trajectory of the individual, or of the group ... Mr. Taylor’s Iowa artists, dancers, and writers demonstrate that, although the risk of the artistic gambit may not have lessened since Gissing’s heyday, new freedoms have broadened their agency.
