Real Life

Real Life took my breath away. Brandon Taylor’s writing was evocative and powerful and the narrative was so expertly plotted — I wish I could read it again, anew. Set over the course of one weekend at a school that seems to be the University of Wisconsin-Madison (but never named), the story focuses on Wallace, a queer Black grad student pursuing a PhD in biochemistry. Having grown up in rural Alabama, his fellow graduate students are so far from his own lived experiences he often feels on the outs of the friend group. But, he gets into a romance — if you can call it that — with a fellow student, who he presumed to be straight, and begins to let his guard down in a (sometimes violent) affair. I didn’t read Real Life as a romantic story, however. It’s a campus story, a figuring-yourself-out-story, it’s a queer story, a story about the racism embedded in institutions.

I love playwright Jeremy O. Harris’s analysis:

I was struck by the whiteness of Wallace’s surroundings, a fact of many spaces of American higher learning, and one rarely articulated in literature by writers of any race. Yet Taylor allows whiteness to move consistently on the periphery of Wallace’s gaze, in tandem with the muted hum of desire: its volume rising and falling as his field of vision encounters white hands adjusting tight shorts revealing flashes of untanned, untouched flesh. Our curiously quiet and cautious protagonist holds a well of desire that could fill the many baths he takes and then some with the viscous liquid of his desire: a desire to escape his past, a desire to find refuge in some future, a desire for a man. A desire that he has constantly sublimated and denied in favor of silent yearning, until that Friday night. Spirals always begin and end with longing, and this is true throughout “Real Life.”

Real Life is, at its core, a queer Black scientist trying to figure out if he can make it in grad school, in academia, in higher learning — but also in so called “real life,” in what exists outside the hallowed halls of campus. A remarkable debut novel (that was just long-listed for the Booker Prize!), and absolutely worth reading.

Rating: ★★★★★