Wallace’s inconsistent emotional states when he’s in Miller’s company can be jarring the novel is at its best and most powerful when Wallace is alone and readers witness his interior solitude in the face of the racism and loneliness he endures. As Wallace begins to doubt his future as an academic and continues to have fraught social interactions, he reveals more about his heartbreaking past to Miller, building toward an unsettling, unresolved conclusion between the two men. Over the following two days, Wallace and Miller awkwardly begin a secret, volatile sexual relationship with troubling violence between them at its margins. Wallace is perpetually ill at ease with his white friends and labmates, especially surly Miller, who unexpectedly admits a sexual interest in Wallace. He discloses to them the recent death of his estranged father, who did not protect him from sexual abuse by a family friend as a child. Though distraught and facing tedious work, he reluctantly meets up with friends from his program to celebrate the last weekend of summer. Wallace, a biochemistry student from Alabama at an unnamed contemporary Midwestern university, discovers his experiment involving breeding nematodes ruined by contaminating mold. I do not have enough words to describe how I loved this book.Taylor’s intense, introspective debut tackles the complicated desires of a painfully introverted gay black graduate student over the course of a tumultuous weekend. ‘Extraordinary, brilliant, claustrophobic, tightly wound, heartbreaking. ‘This extraordinary debut is a manual for life that I wish I ‘d had sooner.’ - Naoise Dolan, author of Exciting Times There is delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.’ - New York Times Elegant, brutal and startlingly intimate, Real Life is a campus novel about learning to live from an electric new voice in fiction. But, over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both the trauma of the past, and the question of the future.
For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn’t go back for the funeral, and he hasn’t told his friends Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his childhood in Alabama.
Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. ‘A tender, deeply-felt, perfectly-paced novel about solitude and society, sexuality and race.’ - Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
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