Roughly half the book follows Lionel, a damaged grad student Charles, a muscled dancer and Sophie, Charles’s headstrong girlfriend - and the dynamics of their entanglement after meeting at the aforementioned potluck, in Madison, Wis.
It establishes a through-line for the collection: the messiness people bring to one another’s fragile lives. In the first story, a pained but casual conversation at a crowded potluck leads to the main character’s full-blown panic attack in the bathroom, ultimately leading to a thorny love triangle. Following the success of his much-lauded debut novel, “ Real Life,” Taylor’s first story collection presents sumptuous, melancholic portraits of characters overwhelmed. Whether Brandon Taylor knows it or not, in “Filthy Animals” he’s provided a perfect companion piece for our nervous era of reopening.
After a long stretch of social isolation, many of us are now wading haphazardly back into public life, reintroducing ourselves to a roster of familiar faces as well as to forgotten discomforts - a crowded room, the icy judgment of strangers, the myriad pressures of being around other people.
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