Learning from Zola

Minor Black Figures is Brandon Taylor’s third and, to my mind, best novel. Its main character, Wyeth, is a painter who enters into a romantic relationship with a former seminarian named Keating. The novel follows the two men—one Black and one white, one who has left religious belief behind and the other who fears religious belief has abandoned him—as they move toward and away from and back toward each other. John Singer Sargent is a favorite of Wyeth’s. He particularly admires how Sargent’s portraits offer “a glimpse of a life that conjured a world because it spoke of all that world contained.” Taylor’s novel does the same thing, conjuring Wyeth’s world and all its concerns: Blackness and representation, art and ideology, money and work, sex and intimacy.