Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor

Jonathan Cape, 2026

Early in Minor Black Figures, the protagonist Wyeth stops outside a bar for a cigarette and sees a ‘rat drag a larger rat over a mound of trash. The larger rat leaked abdominal contents as the two disappeared under a cereal box that had gone soft from humidity.’

It’s a delightful, obscene image in a book that wants to detail everything, from the rats in the gutter to the gallerists in the penthouse. Brandon Taylor’s fourth book traverses the academic, wistful, cute, sharp, romantic, cynical and optimistic, much of the detail evaluated for its artistic import. Wyeth compares the leaking rats to his latest sketches, in the rats’ favour.

Wyeth is something of a cynic; we meet him weathered. A 31-year-old gay black painter who is working in New York as both a gallery assistant and art restorer, he is suffering from a form of painter’s block brought on by years of creative blood-wringing. His early work at art school placed black figures into scenes from old French and Italian cinema. This was 2014, just after Tamir Rice’s murder, and black classmates berated him for ignoring ‘the moment’ to instead fantasise about black presence in white bourgeois life. They worked on depictions of ‘black boys murdered, killed, or otherwise just dead’ (white classmates glanced at the black figures in Wyeth’s work and assumed he was doing the same). In 2020, he painted a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light, rendering the priest and the dead fisherman as black, and naively posted the image on social media. George Floyd had just been killed by Derek Chauvin, and the post exploded, got thousands of likes and plenty of vitriol. Wyeth was accused of being a ‘race-baiter’, of pulling off an ‘identity-based art grift’. Someone DM’d him offering $10,000 for the painting.

Minor Black Figures centres itself on this kind of identity wrangling and the anti-creative vigilance it builds in the artist. Taylor has said he experienced something similar after the publication of his 2020 Booker-shortlisted first novel, Real Life: he was ‘just trying to write a campus novel with a black guy’ but readers immediately loaded it with political intent. This nebulous conundrum, plagued by double- and triple-think, becomes agonising in Taylor’s hands, and as Wyeth runs the gamut of today’s permission anxieties, you begin to fear there is no path forward for today’s black artist.

Another author might conclude with the complaint, or simply refuse the ‘black artist’ epithet – à la Basquiat – but Taylor persists. The novel’s main tension lies in whether Wyeth will learn to paint and live freely, unafraid of being, inevitably, misunderstood. He yearns for ‘an easiness, a lack of care, an unmediated and undiluted channel between him and the world’.

Enter Keating, the catalyst for Wyeth’s development and an almost laughably tantalising love interest. A chain-smoking ex-priest now freelance bricklayer, he is bookish and sensitive but also blonde, muscular and tall, not to mention great with your friends. He is lost in a spiritual crisis similar to that of the priest in Winter Light (the parallels between life and art are constantly called out in the book). The romance is thinner than the publisher’s marketing would have you believe, despite there being an actual swoon, and Wyeth and Keating’s relationship is full of diagnosis, petty fights and jokes that never quite zing. Only during the physical act of sex does the sublime ever take shape. For Taylor, this is likely to the point.

Taylor’s unadorned descriptions of the physical world calmly persevere alongside Wyeth’s abstract doubts and criticisms, suggesting this may be where salvation lies. In a long passage about the restoration of a forgotten black artist’s work, he describes Wyeth patiently rolling eraser granules over the picture’s surface, making sure ‘not to press too hard and to let the dirt lift and come into the eraser rather than trying to dig it out’. The book is thick with suggestions for how to read it, and this is one of its niftiest. Taylor patiently covers Wyeth in simple physical detail, to see if the dirt of racial prejudice will lift away.

There are risks to all the detail. Descriptions of a gin bar and its menu’s cardstock, or a Japanese stationery shop’s pencils, ring like lifestyle porn and an identity capitalism of their own. But this is eventually immaterial in a book that campaigns for a release from such cynicism, for that ‘undiluted channel’ between artist and world. Taylor achieves the ambition. Rather than his race or sexuality, and the expectations of them, and the rebuffs of those expectations, and the rebuffs of those rebuffs, what stay with you are his love of light, of John Singer Sargent and of Éric Rohmer, of pluralist thinking, of small quips given by friends, of a certain kind of sleepy, dopey smile and of art and the making of it.

Penguin: Minor Black Figures

Fred Lunzer

Fred Lunzer is a British and German author based in London, with a background in AI research and strategy.