It is a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. Real Life is, in many ways, a character study. The language, in and of itself, becomes a portrait. In this way, the language mirrors, with perfect asymmetry, Wallace’s own tendency to see himself in every aspect of existence around him. But as fine and vivid as that deep soul-probe is, he zooms outward just as deftly, marking everything, no detail too small to escape his notice. The novel’s narrator, Wallace, speaks to us as if he is closing his eyes and imagining he is opening other eyes that look inward instead of out. It’s both intensely internal and utterly expansive. Taylor’s language has shores, depths, a purpose, and a shape.
The first element that makes Real Life so utterly distinctive is the writing. But that barely touches the experience of reading this novel. On the surface, Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, is the story of a gay black biochemistry student named Wallace from a small town in Alabama studying in an unnamed predominantly white Midwestern university. When I finished reading it, I sat there in the state of bereftness that only comes over me at the end of a particularly good book: the sense of coming slowly back to myself and to the world outside, and finding both echoing with a harrowing sense of hollowness that was not so much the absence of something but the overwhelming presence of something turned inside out. When I wasn’t reading it, it seemed almost to beckon me like a half-curled hand, both pleading and accusatory. For the past 24 hours, there was nothing worth the investment of my time more than reading this book.
My experience of reading Real Life was like a crush, an obsession, a compulsion. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends-some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.Īlmost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree.
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