The Late Americans

by Brandon Taylor

sometimes people took a language class or a lit seminar—the kind of banal intellectual self-improvement that was native to the middle class, so that by the time they were done and had paired and married and settled into cocktail parties and small errands in midsize cities or boroughs of New York, they might be equipped to summon up shards of half-read novels or partially digested critical theory.

They were all posturing all the time. Everything they did was a posture, defensive or offensive, meant to demonstrate something to the outside world, perhaps that they were worthy or good or all right, perhaps to imply that they were in on the joke, that they were nothing and all they had were these crude choreographies of the self.

It was a novel by Mauriac, but now he wished he’d brought along something lighter, like Colette.

Fatima almost laughs. There is a man shouting at her in a dance room about an abortion. There is a literal human man screaming at her because she terminated a pregnancy. In Iowa. It seems like the kind of thing people write Facebook posts about, eliciting sympathy, eliciting collective rage. The sort of story that unspools in a thread on Twitter or a long caption under a teary photo of her face on Instagram. Imagistic, scrubbed of all human particularity and specificity—it’s a kind of story, a kind of thing that happens to people, but that exists primarily as anecdote ready for consumption. Another kind of local economy.