The Realism Deal

Brandon Taylor’s Minor Black Figures (Riverhead, $29)—his fourth book of fiction—is an ambitious departure from his previous work. The novel takes up timely and fraught questions of representation within a culture industry hostile to idiosyncratic depictions of Black life that do not adhere to predictable narratives. At turns satirical and humane, the novel follows the romantic relationship of an unlikely pair: Wyeth, a painter, and Keating, a former Jesuit seminarian who meet sharing a cigarette after an opening for a group show of artists who traffic in the kind of identitarian and didactic art the novel is not interested in replicating.