The Late Americans is a novel that weaves together the lives of a range of young people in Iowa, exploring relationships, sex, class, race, and searching for your future. A group of dancers are looking to see what they do when their college course ends, various friends test their dynamics with sex and arguments, and, eventually, some of them go to a cabin for a last vacation before they leave Iowa.
Each section of the book tells a chunk of the story through a focus on a particular character or two, mostly within a particular friend group though some characters are much more on the periphery than others, and you continue to see characters and their narratives even once their particular chapter is over. I was expecting this structure to be more confusing than it actually was: it isn’t a style of novel I tend to enjoy, but in this case I felt I could easily start to pick up how everyone wove together after the first few chapters and the perspective changes meant you go to see various viewpoints and senses of character dynamics. The writing has a distinctive style, occasionally purposefully at arms’ length, and it may take a moment to get used to, but then it does bring an interesting vibe to the novel, a sense of zooming in and out, seeing into the lives of complex characters who often make mistakes and put pressure on their relationships.
Even if you’re not usually a fan of novels that move between a range of characters in a broader group, The Late Americans may be worth reading (also, I found Taylor’s Real Life just fine and preferred this one). It depicts a messy group of people who have different takes on the world, but are all looking for their future, and does create something coherent out of the cacophony.
Fiendfully Reading 
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