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Real Life by Brandon Taylor Wallace is a black, queer, chubby, and introverted student attending a graduate science program in the Midwest. In other words, he’s a character who doesn’t get featured in a lot of campus fiction. In Brandon’s Taylor debut novel Real Life, though, it is entirely through his eyes that we witness one notable weekend with his friends and colleagues (and campus birds?? there are so many birds) play out.
Much to my surprise, there is actually a lot of social drama — not just microscopic worm-related drama — to be mined within the academic bubble of biochemistry. And I’m talking about the world that exists outside of the pages of this book, too. Taylor, who, prior to becoming a writer, was a biochemistry researcher, has spoken openly about being motivated to write this book after observing the “catty politics” of research labs.
Taylor, also like Wallace, is black, queer, and comes from a working class background in Alabama. His personal struggles with being the only black person in his program and constantly dodging micro-aggressions (and some just blatant aggressions — you will know which I’m referring) are also Wallace’s personal struggles.
Real Life brings to mind the will-they-won’t-they dynamics of Hanya Yanagihara’s 2015 novel A Little Life’s twentysomething friend group. It also feels like an unexpected companion piece to psychologist Alan Downs’ 2005 nonfiction book Velvet Rage, about growing up gay, and which also investigates the gay man’s strained relationship with his father. (The relationship between Wallace and his recently deceased father looms large here.)
Taylor’s obsessive habit of detailing physical landscape can feel tedious at times and his dialogue is occasionally stilted. But with the knowledge that this is only Taylor’s first published novel, it’s hard not to get excited about the stuffy and homogenous worlds he might explode in his follow-up efforts. I’ll keep an eye out for him. Get your copy now. — Colin Gorenstein
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