Real Life by Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor’s debut novel Real Life zooms in on a weekend in the life of Wallace, a Black, gay biochemistry grad student from Alabama now living and studying in the glaring Whiteness of a Midwestern research university. The novel feels at once like an itch and a sigh: there’s a constant feeling of overwhelming dissatisfaction paired with utter resignation as Wallace heads to a gathering of his friends by the lake. He’s just found out that his nematode experiment has been contaminated by mold, and he’s only a few weeks removed from the death of his father, but it quickly becomes clear that the kind of intimacy he has with his friends is stilted at best. He hasn’t told them about his father’s death, and I could kind of understand why as, through the fog of his depression and self-doubt, Wallace meets up with his friends—they all come off as snippy, mean, oversensitive, and blasé at once.
The desultory conversational style of Wallace’s friends (who all seem like shades of one another, since there’s no real differentiation in how any of them talk) was what first reminded me of European or American modernist novels, but the parallels are really abundant. Time in Real Life tunnel-visions and then expands in a way that evoked Virginia Woolf. The friend group goes from one engagement to the next, drinking, sailing, dining, affecting urbanity and conviviality— even though none of them seem to like one another—in a way that made me think (unfortunately) of Hemingway. Though Tolstoy and a short story set in Madrid also garner mention, To the Lighthouse is the text most clearly referenced, and the novel as a whole is passionately invested in the exploration of the inner life, consciousness, emotions, anxieties, and traumas.
Because of Wallace’s identity as Black, Southern, and gay, his alienation amidst his White, Northern/Midwestern (or, kind of inexplicably, German or French), ambivalently queer friend group is completely believable, especially when even the friends he’s ostensibly closest to refuse to acknowledge or call out the multiple instances of racism that manifest in the various gatherings the novel details. Unfortunately, these moments of gut-punching believability are watered down by dialogue that in general reads like it came out of an affected book from the 1920s, rather than from the mouths of millennial biochem grad students living in the Midwest in 2020. This awkward, repetitive dialogue (often hinging on contrived misunderstandings rather than any really driving conflict) clashed with Taylor’s masterful interior prose, which fluttered and wheeled between the grotesque and the rapturous, pulling crystalline moments of insight, terror, and utter ambivalence out of the mundane: walking down a hallway or street, striking a tennis ball, drinking a glass of water.
There are fascinating parallels between the alienation of the modernist Lost Generation and the alienation of a traumatized gay Black Southern American who finds himself surrounded by mediocre and racist “Good White People.” Real Life just could have used a little more plot and some judicious editing to make these dynamics as vivid and, unfortunately, believable as they are in real real life.