Review of the Day: Minor Black Figures

Brandon Taylor’s novel is the story of Wyeth, a black gay artist living in NYC. While Wyeth is an artist working in a low level job for a gallery, at least in my opinion, the art world that he works in is something of a MacGuffin — just a thing that moves the plot along —  because what Taylor says about art in the book is less than inspired.

The legacy of the black artist in the Western world was a kind of wrangling with the long history of subjectification and objectification. Even the phrase negro figuration presupposed a constructed social identity that had to be wrenched open and climbed out of in order to get to a place of actual subjective experience (location 2652).

Taylor has some more inspired thoughts on modern urban life:

When Wyeth had first moved to the city, he’d tried to initiate small talk with a guy in the cart, not understanding that this was simply a form of liberal condescension and that what the man wanted simply was to take the order, make the food, and move on to the next customer, and that by delaying things, asking the man where he was from, how long his shift was, how he handled the heat while standing over steaming tubs of hot dogs or baskets of fries, he, Wyeth, was in fact actively making the man’s job harder (location 1115).

The real subject of Taylor’s book is the relationship between Wyeth and Keating, another gay black man who has recently left the Catholic priesthood. Some of the best parts of the book, at least in my opinion, are the descriptions of the two together:

He gently held the back of Wyeth’s head and kissed him, tenderly, affectionately. It was not a kiss that was a prelude to fucking or even a question, unlike the first kiss. It was a thing unto itself (location 890).

Readers should be aware that Taylor has some explicit descriptions of male-male love, including anal sex.

Overall, what I most enjoyed about Minor Black Figures was the fact that it is a tender story about two people trying to understand the boundaries of friendship, love, and sex.

Thanks to the publisher for providing a free copy via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

epub. 400 pgs. 15 October 2025. Published 14 October 2025.