In his second novel, Brandon Taylor moves his diverse cast of graduate students from Madison, Wis., to Iowa City as he continues his unsparing view of life in and around the Ivory Tower.
While the campus novel has a long tradition of airing the foibles of academia, Taylor's critique goes deeper. And darker.
The book's title hints that Americans are at some kind of end point, and that a wake is needed for such qualities as civility, sincerity, equity, love and hope.
The novel opens with a blazing, satirical look at a graduate seminar in creative writing. A young woman reads aloud a long confessional poem that sparks praise.
"I want this in my veins. Hard," says Helen.
Fellow student Seamus, however, finds the work pretentious, "the aping of poetry in search of validation." He mockingly asks its writer, "Are you a poet or a caseworker?" Things go badly from there.
We cut to Seamus' part-time job as a chef at a hospice, preparing mushroom bisque for terminal patients.
When describing skilled labor, Taylor's prose grows luminous, as when Seamus "peeled a fresh pile of onions, and pulled the knife through their bulk with one certain motion. He loved that first bite of the knife through the material wet of the ingredients. He could read, in that very first moment, the final taste of the dish."
