Brandon Taylor shows us the beauty and terror in seeking connection
The characters in Filthy Animals — Brandon Taylor’s short story collection published in 2021— exist in ambiguous and often precarious emotional states. We meet them in vulnerable moments (after a stay in the hospital, after a break up) and watch as they navigate a world that seems to threaten their fragile stability. While reading the eleven stories in this collection I felt, at times, in danger. During quiet moments between strangers at a house party, ex-lovers sharing a dinner, and childhood best friends getting high in the woods, we see the horror and hope of reaching out for something more.
In “Potluck” a young man named Lionel attends, you guessed it, a potluck. Surrounded by people he vaguely knows, Lionel contemplates the way he related to people prior to his recent hospital stay following a suicide attempt. “It was clear to him now, in a way that it hadn’t been before, that he and every other graduate student depended on the currency of their university affiliations to get by in conversations.” Now on break from his graduate program, Lionel senses his diminished social capital at the party. “People looked at him differently when he didn’t mention that he’d once been a student or that he had a university affiliation. They looked through him, but the worst part of it was that he sometimes looked through himself in the same way.” Upon catching the eye of a handsome ballet dancer, Charles, Lionel suddenly feels seen. He is released from the noise in his mind and the surrounding party.
The two men look out to each other from across a crowded living room a few more times and eventually speak. While Lionel lives inside his head, he watches the way Charles exists within a powerfully built body. The two men talk, misunderstand one another, try to make things right, try to get to know one another. Lionel feels a connection to Charles, but grows wary upon observing an intimate interaction between Charles and another ballet dancer at the potluck called Sophie. And so a kind of dance begins between these three: Lionel, Charles, and Sophie, in which only the latter two appear to know the choreography. I held my breath for Lionel, who seems so delicate, so out of his depth. He shows up, along with Charles and Sophie, throughout the story collection as the three get to know one another, touching and testing the limits of their new bonds.
“As Though That Were Love” reminds us of the strange and unruly shapes intimacy can take. Over the course of one winter evening in a secluded cabin, two men, Hartjes and Simon, share a history, share dinner, and share a moment of violence that perhaps neither fully understands. Taylor deftly probes the uncomfortable ways in which no relationship is fully equal. One might want more. The other wishes he did. The tension between Hartjes and Simon crackles with everything the two men do not say. Still, they talk, eat their stew, and go upstairs. “Hartjes knew that if he made an excuse right then right at that very moment, he might get away. He might yet manage to extricate himself. But he did not.”
Brandon Taylor is a master of menacing moments, but I’d be remiss not to include just how tender the author is towards his characters. In “Anne of Cleves”, a woman learns to be gentle with herself even when the men surrounding her are not. In “What Made Them Made You” we see how, even in the face of narrow-mindedness, one can be both soft and strong. With his clean, precise prose, the author makes meaning out of moments often overlooked. He reminds us that what we say and what we withhold matters, even when we think no one’s paying attention.
Brandon Taylor’s characters spend their time thinking, observing, and speaking to those around them, but his work is ultimately a sensory experience. The author’s world is alive with woodsmoke, cold nights, warm meals and hot bodies. His protagonists move through it with a certain rawness and wry sense of humor. They may be vulnerable, but they are also courageous in their attempts to forge authentic relationships. In reading Filthy Animals, I am reminded that while there is danger in reaching out, it is worthy of the risk.
- S.L. Gowda