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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC Studios in Soho. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming right now, or listening on demand, I'm grateful you're here. On today's show, LeBron James is not playing in this season's NBA finals, but you can see the play King James which uses his career as a structure for a friendship between two sports fans. The playwright and actors, Glen Davis and Chris Perfetti, yes, Jacob from Albert Elementary will join us. This big question, should we separate the art from the artist?

Can it even be done? We puzzle through that and what to do about great work by bad people with Claire Dederer, author of the new book Monsters, A Fans Dilemma, and it's the cusp of spring and summer, also known as peak growing season. If you want to bring some greenery into your life, now is a great time. We'll be joined by Chris Sach, also known as the Plant Doctor. He'll join me in studio in about 30 minutes to take your calls. That is our plan. Let's get this started with Brandon Taylor's new novel.

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Alison Stewart: Author Brandon Taylor's new novel, The Late Americans, is a story of graduate students in Iowa City told from multiple perspectives. We begin with Seamus, who gets annoyed with what he thinks is posturing by some of his seminar cohort. He's white working class and many of them are not. Then there's another student, Timo, a vegetarian who is dating Fyodor. A local who works in meat packing. Animal rights becomes a third party in their relationship. There's also Fatima, a dancer and reluctant barista, Goran, a graduate student studying music who comes from family money and is dating a finance student named Ivan, who comes from a lot less.

NPR says of the book The Late Americans, "Arguably, many of Taylor's Late Americans represent the modern counterparts of characters that populate the novels of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Theodore Dreiser. Those who are shaped by their histories, or confined by their strict yet undefined social regulations. In this sense, perhaps Taylor implies that the modern university experience has failed us for we have not succeeded in transcending our ideological social, and economic barriers. Even in an open setting for experimental learning." The Late Americans is out now. You may remember Brandon joined us to discuss this debut novel, Real Life. That one was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Brandon, welcome.

Brandon Taylor: Thank you for having me. Thrilled to be back.

Alison Stewart: Would you start by reading a little bit of the book?

Brandon Taylor: I would love to. I'm going to read actually from near the end of the book from a chapter called Local Economies, which is about Fatima whom you mentioned. "Fatima works in a downtown cafe frequented by graduate students, professors, and a certain amalgam of townies that she sometimes calls the un-landed gentry. The other dancers argue about money in terms so abstract and moral that it isn't even real money they're arguing about so much as economic systems. They are for the most part, blandly socialist, the seizure and redistribution of wealth, the proliferation of welfare systems, a general softness to the analytic frameworks of the world. Fatima thinks about money in a real-time, concrete way, as in how is she going to pay her tuition, feed herself, launder her tights, pay for afternoon movies, pay for electricity, for internet, for heat. Money is like an animal changeful and anxious, ready to flee or bite. There is never enough of it." I'll stop there.

Alison Stewart: Brandon, in a pinned tweet on your account, it reads, "When I was working on this book, I had a lot of doubt. I had a lot of really ugly, brutal questions about myself and my art." First of all, where did the doubt come from?

Brandon Taylor: [chuckles] I think the doubt in large part came from myself. It came from a lot of questioning whether or not the world needed another book about artists. There are people who, when I was writing the book would ask me like, "You're just writing about graduate students. Why do you keep doing that? That's not very interesting." I internalized a lot of that rhetoric and in the end, I just came to the realization that if these questions felt urgent to me, then maybe they would feel urgent to other people. I had to follow my own interests, so to speak.

Alison Stewart: The first few pages of the book are at this poetry seminar and the students are from all different walks of life. Why did you want to start this story there?

Brandon Taylor: I think it starts there because that's the first character who walked into my mind, was this cranky, sour, poetry student in the Midwest. At the time I myself was a cranky, sour, fiction student in the Midwest, and I had a lot of frustration about the ways that we talked about art, not just in seminar, but it felt like broadly in the cultural discourse, we had these ready-made schematics and rhetoric, and it all felt very moralistic to me. I wanted to write about that. I wanted to dramatize that experience. [chuckles] I think it starts there because that's where the book began for me. Seamus was the first character who came to me.

Alison Stewart: What's one of those sort of ready-made pre-packaged schematics that we all entertain or gets entertained in academia?

Brandon Taylor: I think a lot of the discourse around "Writing across difference" is one that really I find so silly and I think most artists I know also find it kind of silly, but if you were to take what happens on Twitter as-- [laughs] If you were to take that to be like the rhetoric of the real world, you would assume that all artists are out here sort of launching grenades at each other, overriding across difference but it's really not like that. I think that most artists approach their characters from the same vantage point no matter what they might have in common with them. In writing class and writing workshops, there's always this lingering specter of like, "Do you have a right to tell that story?" I think it's a very boring [laughs] way to begin engaging with art.

Alison Stewart: You give us clues as to the vibe in the room of that seminar. The example of this character, Noreen, who is described as "West Virginian with a faint lilt that might have been faked. "What does that detail tell us? What does it tell us about the energy in that room, in that seminar?

Brandon Taylor: I think I was having a lot of fun coming up with all these gross caricatures of the kinds of people one encounters when moving through creative spaces. I think broadly Noreen, that character represents a very common type today, which is that we're all performing versions of ourselves in a lot of ways. The most profitable thing to be in America right now is a type that can be easily understood and read in cultural and artistic settings and so we're all kind of performing. We're all putting on a shtick. We're all trying to turn ourselves into these marketable entities. Yes, she was my way of poking fun at that dynamic.

Alison Stewart: This is just yes or no. Because I don't want to get you into hot water. Are these characters people who have been in class with you? [chuckles]

Brandon Taylor: No. There are no real people in this book. I think more than anything, a lot of Seamus's behavior, especially comes from my own behaviors both expressed and unexpressed in that workshop setting. I think the characters in the book, I think of them as more indictments of my own personality [laughs] more than sending up anyone else. I feel like my own flesh is as much on the cutting block as anybody else's. There are no sort of direct inspirations in the book I don't think. More the vibe. [laughs] The vibe was the thing I was trying to recreate.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Brandon Taylor. The new novel is called The Late Americans. Okay, so here's Seamus. This poetry grad student doesn't exactly click with the other students, the other people in his cohort, is just actively annoyed by them. What really just makes Seamus nuts?

Brandon Taylor: [laughs] I think falseness or his idea of falseness. He's a very high bar of truth. The things that set him off are when people write poems that he perceives to be nakedly autobiographical or nakedly sentimental and people call them good and it really upsets him. It makes him feral. There are many moments in the book where he lashes out when he perceives that someone has done something that is false and been rewarded for it. That's the thing that he just cannot abide.

Alison Stewart: He begins to struggle. He begins to struggle over his own poetry and he isn't submitting work. What's the source of Seamus's struggle?

Brandon Taylor: I think the source of that struggle is very much a thing that happens to many writers, which is once you go to a program or any kind of scenario where you're submitting work to be considered in a group setting or otherwise, you become incredibly self-conscious. That happened to me after my first two books were published. I went from writing in the quiet dark of anonymity to writing books that one-day people might read. I became so aware of that and it made me really self-conscious and it made me feel really awkward with myself and really doubt myself. The other component to Seamus's particular difficulty is that his classmates don't like his work. They don't like his work at all. On the one hand, he's like, "Well, their judgment is illegitimate because I don't value their input." On the other hand, when you're hearing time and time again that your work isn't very good, it does something to you, or it can do something to you. I know it certainly has done things to me in the past. His struggle is both the struggle of being too self-aware and too self-conscious and also, the struggle of feeling ridiculed by your peers. I think those two things can be really deadly to the fledgling writer.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about Iowa. You write in the book, "Iowa was kind of a cultural winter. They had all come to the speck of a city in the middle of a middle state in order to study art, to hone themselves in their ideas like perfect, terrifying weapons. In the monastic kind of deprivation they found here, they turned to one another." What was a characteristic about this part of the country that you knew you wanted to capture in this book and how this part of this country affected these students?

Brandon Taylor: I think it was very much that intense monastic feeling. I've been to two graduate programs in the Midwest. I am a lifelong Southerner. I grew up in the South and then I moved to the Midwest for graduate school. In both instances, I found myself in these scenarios where I was in this incredibly self-selected group of people who had dedicated their lives to the rigorous study or pursuit of a craft or skill, or knowledge. There's something about that when you live in a place for five or six years, but you know you're going to leave it. When you're surrounded by people who are also there for that reason and you have all these things in common that you begin to chafe.

I think you chafe on the similarities and you look for these differences and you imbue those differences no matter how minor they might be with all this great importance. It causes you to act out. The other part of it is that very often college towns in the Midwest, there are these smaller cities in these smaller towns where there isn't a lot to distract you which is great for doing work, but it's not so great if you're blocked. It's not so great for your social life. The people who you are studying with or your peers, they're your friend group, but also they're the people that you're interacting with the most. Some of them do become your enemies and you see them every day. It's this great cauldron of human drama and social chafing.

Alison Stewart: Also, in the social chafing silo is the town and gown of it all. At one point you write from Fyodor. I hope I'm saying that right, his perspective and how he's a local, he's the one who works in the meat packing plant or the undressing. He points that he admired students in this town. Here's the quote from his section, "But then he'd run into undergrads at bars and clubs and he'd seen the way their eyes dimmed when they spoke to him, and he tried to speak to them, the way they slowly became aware they belonged to different worlds." What did you find interesting about that tension between town and gown?

Brandon Taylor: Oh, yes. It was fascinating, truly fascinating. That tension was there even amongst the grad students and undergraduates. I even remember a couple of times being out with friends at cafes and being surrounded by undergraduates and then just looking out at them and being like, "Oh, the undergrads, they're so everywhere." Then going to a grocery store to buy something and chatting to the butcher who was behind the meat counter and really struggling to find common ground because it's like, "Oh, we are both in this town. We both live here. We watch the same news, but we have such different relations to this place."

It wasn't horrible. It wasn't huge or bad or scary. It was really these small gaps in the social fabric that you became aware of when you would speak to people who had a different affiliation or valence to the city than you had. Then you'd have to awkwardly find a way to slide out of those interactions. It could be quite dark. There was sometimes a sense of resentment that we were there to get educations and leave and then to talk down about these small towns.

There was some of that for sure. Other times it was also a lot of fun. I really enjoyed meeting people who weren't students in Madison and in Iowa City. Some of my closest friends were people who weren't affiliated with the university and those places, and they taught me a lot about the place and the local history. It's good and it's bad and it's all very complicated.

Alison Stewart: You go into detail about the work in the meat plant. What research did you do for that because you get into some detail?

Brandon Taylor: I grew up on a farm in Alabama, and we would dress our own food. We would shoot deer and dress them. I was taught to do that from a very young age. I know what the inside of animals look like. Many of my uncles worked at meat plants and at chicken plants because that's one of the jobs that you can get if you don't have a high school degree or if you've spent time incarcerated. There are these jobs in animal husbandry that you can get or in factories and stuff like that. I was very familiar with industrial settings. I was very familiar with the dressing of animal carcasses and stuff like that.

Then it was just a matter of watching a lot of footage and watching a lot of interviews and listening to people who work those jobs, talk about those jobs because for me it wasn't enough just to get the names for the knives. It felt important to hear how people talk about their work and to listen to the rhythms and the inflections and the language that they use and to try to move that into the subjectivity of my characters. It was just a lot of research, a lot of finding analogs to things that I was very, very familiar with and then just working the language until it felt right and true.

Alison Stewart: It was so obvious to me. I'm so glad to hear that because it was really clear to me that you weren't reporting on how to do that. That somehow you had knowledge of it, just the way it's written.

Brandon Taylor: That felt really important to me. I didn't want it to feel like, "Oh, somebody from the outside's going in with a notebook and stealing all the value," because Fyodor, that is his life. That is his job. If I'm writing from his subjectivity, it's got to feel like it's coming from his subjectivity. I can't linger on things that he would find unremarkable because that just wouldn't read true and that I had to find a way to render that experience with his particular set of idioms and references. I'm glad that you didn't feel that it was too repertorial.

Alison Stewart: Not at all. My guest is Brandon Taylor, the name of the novel is The Late Americans. It is out now. What does the title refer to?

Brandon Taylor: I'm a really huge fan of Henry James, and he has this great novel called The American. I really love that book. One day I was sitting in class feeling really frustrated about a seminar that was just very pious and I thought, man, we were like in an exhibit and I would call it The Americans, but Henry James has already stolen that. He's so good with titles but I could write a book called The Late Americans. I think of the title is trying to encompass many, many different aspects of living in America at this particular moment in time when many of us feel that we have arrived too late to partake in the American project such as it is.

When many of us feel that we're arriving at a time when all of the goodness and all of the old systems of meaning and value have lost their significance and lost their power. That feeling of cultural lateness pervades a lot of the conversations I have with my own friends. It's really about that. It's about a sense of pervasive lateness which maybe is a pessimistic aura to society.

Alison Stewart: Money touches many of the aspects of these stories, characters have it, some don't, some have to work. This idea that they're all engaged in poetry and art and academia and student debt, I can go on and on. How did you think about the role of money in this story?

Brandon Taylor: Money is very important to me as an author because I'm so invested in capturing all the forces that shape my character's lives. I just feel like we don't write enough about money in this country. I think money is such a limiting reagent to so many of our lives and so many of us spend a lot of time thinking about money and how it affects us and how it makes certain opportunities possible or impossible. I was determined to write about it in ways that felt true, but not too preachy. I wanted to write about moments where characters' lives are very much intersected by a need for money or a lack of money, or a proliferation of money in thinking about how that informs and affects their relationships to themselves and to each other, and to their histories. It felt like an important component of the social milia because in a lot of ways, many grad students do not have enough money and their labor is often exploited by academia.

It seems like one of the hallmarks of academia. It just felt important. It would've felt false to leave that aside when so much of the graduate student experience and so much of the contemporary American experience is about precarity due to not having access to money, as simple as that. It's there because it feels so crucial to this moment we're in.

Alison Stewart: This is the very 21st-century book. They Facetime each other. The characters have smartphones. There's references to the 2008 financial crash. What was important to you to capture about our culture in this moment?

Brandon Taylor: With my first two books I felt like they were in a kind of suspended time where they could have happened at any time. The interiority and the discursive terrain of those books was very much dealing in the self. With this book I felt that I had finally matured enough as a writer to take on history. Basically, I wanted this book to feel very much tethered to a particular time in American history. So much of the characters' circumstances and horizons of possibility have to do with the fact that they're in 2018, 2019 basically.

Capturing that felt crucial. It felt crucial to the project. I don't think that this book works without a sense of specific temporal location. It just doesn't work without that. It was a lot of trying to figure out how to get Trump in, how to get Obama in, how to get cash for clunkers in. Then once I decided I was going to do it and stressed about doing it, then it just became fun. I got to riff on-- cash for clunkers. What a throwback.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] It's interesting that you're on our show today because Claire Dederer, who wrote Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma is going to be on next hour. Am I right that you did a Q&A with her?

Brandon Taylor: I did. We did an event together in New York a couple of weeks ago.

Alison Stewart: At Books or Magic, I think. That whole premise of that book and the discussion is what about art versus artists, art and artists? Can you separate the two? I'm curious if you have thoughts on that.

Brandon Taylor: [laughs] Yes, I do. First of all, I love Claire's book. It's really fantastic. I don't know that I agreed at first with the premise that we needed to separate art from artists. I'm still not sure where I land on that. I don't know that I personally feel a need to do that, but I do understand that as a moral project, it's very difficult, because how important is the biography to the art?

I do think that there are specific instances where the author's biography very much like the sort of brutal ugly things about their biography are also the brutal ugly things about their art. That's an interesting place to stage that question. For me, broadly, I don't know that I agree with the premise, but I know that it is very much like a discourse that dominates our culture.

Alison Stewart: One of the things you said I thought was so funny, you're like, "We just all know too much about everybody."

Brandon Taylor: Yes, I do. I think we know too much about everybody. Very often I'll be scrolling on the timeline and we'll encounter a scandal happening and my first thought is we should know less about other people. [laughs] We just should know less. We should know less about other people. I don't want to know all that. I don't need to know all that. I should not have to be forming a moral opinion about who you were dating. I don't need to know that.

Alison Stewart: Taylor Swift somewhere once said, "Thank you. I appreciate that."

Brandon Taylor: I'm like, I don't know that we need to form opinions about these particular aspects of artists' lives. Now that we have the material, of course, that is now a sight of moral interrogation, I guess, for some people. I am not one of those people.

Alison Stewart: Brandon Taylor's new novelist called The Late Americans. You can get it at your favorite local independent bookstore. Brandon, thank you so much for being with us.

Brandon Taylor: Thank you for having me. It was a thrill.

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