A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award “A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, … Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper’s Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. 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. 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.
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.
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There is writing so exceptional, so intricately crafted that it demands reverence. The intimate prose of Brandon Taylor’s exquisite debut novel, Real Life, offers exactly that kind of writing. He writes so powerfully about so many things — the perils of graduate education, blackness in a predominantly white setting, loneliness, desire, trauma, need. Wallace, the man at the center of this novel, is written with nuance and tenderness and complexity… Truly, this is stunning work from a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.
This book blew my head and heart off. For a debut novelist to disentangle and rebraid intimacy, terror, and joy this finely seems like a myth. But that, and so much more, is what Brandon Taylor has done in Real Life. The future of the novel is here and Brandon Taylor is that future’s name.
I felt this young man’s pain in every page. It will really make you rethink your relationships and how you choose to interact with others. Very eye-opening
Read and repeat. Brandon Taylor has an incredible gift. This book shines and I’ll never forget the first time I looked to make sure okay, there are more pages left. —because aside from the beauty of his words, he’s a gifted storyteller.
I know the year is young but this book will be a very difficult one to beat as the favorite for 2020. So here’s the deal: Wallace is a young-ish research scientist in a graduate program at a Wisconsin university. His project is an arcane subject understood by few and his friends are, out of necessity, other research scientists working on similarly difficult-to-understand projects. The work is mostly solitary, so Wallace spends a great deal of time being, and feeling isolated. But other things isolate him as well. He is Black and gay, in a place where most people are white, and (at least ostensibly) straight. The novel takes place over the course of weekend when Wallace is struggling with a mishap in this lab experiments, and the crashing realization that he has not fully come to terms with his father’s recent death.
To escape the lab, and his burgeoning sense of personal and academic failure, Wallace decides to join his friends at the lake, something he generally declines to do. That late summer lunch at the lake sets into motion a weekend filled with new beginnings, revelations, self-discovery and the potential of a new relationship (I hesitate to call it a “romance” given what transpires) between Wallace and a straight friend with whom he has a confounding and sometimes troubling dynamic.
Through Wallace, the author explores the role of race, gender and sexuality in society, but also in academia where intellectual pursuits sometimes provide a convenient escape from dealing with your shit. And Wallace has plenty of shit. His difficult, impoverished childhood, the soft bigotry of his adviser’s (and fellow students’) low expectations, and even the (mostly) benign inability of his friends to understand their own prejudices. As the weekend unfolds, and Wallace’s new relationship develops, we see his scars and fears uncovered one by one, and his resigned acceptance of the notion that perhaps he deserves nothing good in his life.
Brandon Taylor is an exceptional writer. Exceptional. Not just because of the way he uses and manipulates language making most of his prose a thing of beauty, but because of the keen insight he has into human nature–the things that make people scared, and that motivate them, the reasons they act, or accept the status quo, the ways they deal with pain, and express joy. I was especially excited by this book because it provided an unflinching view into the psyche of a Black gay man; how he seeks and expresses intimacy, how he grapples with not being the aesthetic ideal in a culture that values physical beauty, and how he must navigate the perils of straight men who in his experience may only seek to damage and exploit him.
This was a sad, and at many points violent, and dark story. But there was beauty in it as well, especially in the way the author showed people trying to connect with and hold on to each other. Afraid, always afraid of ultimately winding up alone. Wallace, heartbreakingly, both feared and expected loneliness. I feared for him every step of the way, often wondering whether he would harm himself, or come to harm from others. I felt more deeply for him earlier on in this novel than I have for almost any other character since Jojo in Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’. Brandon Taylor’s skillful writing had me thoroughly invested in him before the end of the first chapter. I wanted happiness for Wallace, desperately. And at the end, I found myself still hoping for it, as though he continued to live and breathe off the page. Now, for me, that’s good writing.
Highly recommended if you like introspective literary fiction.
The affections and disaffections of grad school life are shot through with the searing experience of white racial presumption and blindness in Brandon Taylor’s vivid and exacting Real Life.
Real Life is a gorgeous work of art, and the introduction of a singular new voice. Through Wallace, the book explores the tension of a person trying to become himself while surrounded by people who can see him only as their own projection. Even as Brandon Taylor dives beneath the level of polite surface interaction and into the ache of what people conceal from one another, or reveal only as weaponry, his sharply rendered observations make it a true pleasure to spend time in this book’s world.
Real Life is one of the finest fiction debuts I’ve read in the last decade — elegant and brutal, handled by an author whose attention to the heart is unlike any other’s. A magnificent novel.
A few summer days, a group of friends, a difficult intimacy — with the simplest materials, Real Life reveals the knives we pocket in good intentions, our constant, communal sabotage of love. Brandon Taylor’s genius lies in the elaboration of ever more revelatory gradations of feeling; in his extraordinary debut he invents new tools for navigating the human dark in which we know one another. He is a brilliant writer, and this is a beautiful book.