Real Life
by Brandon Taylor
Nominations: Aspen Words Longlist 2021, Booker Finalist 2020, Center For Fiction Longlist 2020, National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2020
Date Read: January 8, 2022
Real Life gripped me from the first page to the last. It’s been a while since I felt so deeply for a character as I did for Wallace. He is so wounded but trying. Rising above, while still sinking under. Wanting love but holding back. I resonate with all of this so much, even if I am a straight, white girl and Wallace is a gay, black boy.
Wallace has risen above his inauspicious beginnings in Alabama poverty and landed in graduate school studying biology in a large, midwestern city. He is the only black person in his graduate program and he feels this fact starkly in how he is treated and side-eye looks from just about everyone. Still, Wallace is grinding, head down, catching up on the knowledge he is supposed to know but is behind on.
With such a small coterie of biology graduate students, Wallace finds himself with an instant set of friends who share some of the same struggles he does in bizarre lab hours, mistakes with disheartening outcomes, experiment successes and failures. As much as Wallace may want to jump in, he keeps so much of himself to himself that no one in the group really knows him. The real him. He doesn’t even share when his father passes away. Losing his father is more affecting than Wallace is willing to admit.
From a hate/annoying relationship with Miller, another bio-grad student, an affair blooms that is both tender and brutal. Wallace allows Miller, a professed straight guy but clearly bi, to use and abuse his body, never speaking up for himself. Miller never really asks about Wallace’s satisfaction in their sexual encounters and I’m not quite sure that Miller even knows that Wallace is impotent. Wallace can’t get hard largely due to long-term sexual abuse he experienced at 9 (9!), of which his parents were aware and did pretty much nothing about.
Wallace is also struggling at school, being manipulated and mistreated by another new student, Deana. She is sabotaging Wallace and finding ways to blame him for her failures. In all of these relationships, I want so much for Wallace to stand up for himself, to assert his voice and claim what’s rightfully his – a life with joy. Maybe not all the time but some of the time.
With Taylor’s intimate prose and slow revealing of Wallace’s desire for more – more connection, more intimacy, more peace – the reader wanders through the complexity of Wallace’s unique circumstances. While he is at a crossroads of sorts, the novel ends uncertainly but with a ray of hope. This is an absolutely beautiful, exquisite novel. Love.
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