he stakes in Brandon Taylor’s fiction are always high – strikingly so, given these are campus novels. Lovers and gods are cruel; life’s beauty is dangerously close to being unbearable. Early on in The Late Americans, graduate student poet Seamus pictures his cohort as living in a dollhouse: “It was so easy to imagine the hands of some enormous and indifferent God prying the house open and squinting at them as they went about their lives … in an exhibit called The Late Americans.” Are our lives spectacles? And how can we continue to live when
