Brandon Taylor’s Fiction of Class and Campuses

In his review of Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You?, which appeared in The New York Times in 2021, the writer Brandon Taylor took a certain tendency in contemporary fiction to task. In the growing body of novels about the panic and precarity of 21st-century life, Taylor noted, the central characters—often middle-class white women—talk fretfully about “their privilege and access to capital” as a stand-in for an “actual class critique.” But, he wondered, “is that enough?”