Wyeth has a problem. How can he, a black artist, find a way to paint black figures on his own terms? And how can he avoid being subsumed by the ideological currents of his times? ‘For what it’s worth,’ one character counsels, ‘I think you should do what you want, the world is ending.’ Brandon Taylor’s absorbing and elegant novel of ideas follows Wyeth as he grapples with identity politics, art world commercialism and young love.

The summer of Black Lives Matter has come and gone, and so has the flash of accidental success Wyeth enjoyed after a painting of two black figures – one alive, one dead, based on a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s film Winter Light – is picked up on social media, selling for $10,000. The experience left him with the sensation of having made money from ‘black suffering’. 

In the novel’s present, it seems there is nothing Wyeth can do to release himself from paralysing questions about his role as an artist. He trudges from his job at a gallery in the ‘ugly, grossly commercial part of Chelsea’ to his role as an art restorer (‘the worst thing