This is one of the first books I read from my round of judging for the BookTube Prize. I had tried to read it twice before, and wasn’t able to get into it. I hoped that, with the added motivation of reading it for the prize, I’d be able to get through the rocky start and finally find my stride with it. And I did, kind of.
This is the story of Wallace, a Black, gay college student in an almost entirely White program. He has a group of friends, but from the start there are hints of rifts and conflicts between them that widen to chasms as the story progresses.
Nothing in Wallace’s life feels like it fits. He ended up in a school that doesn’t exactly welcome him with open arms. His colleagues, all except for one, seem to be rooting for him to fail and his supervisor seems to willfully ignore the ineptitude of other students, pinning the blame for any problems on him. Even his group of friends don’t seem to understand him and don’t stand up for him or call each other out when they’re being racially insensitive.
Where this book excels is in capturing the constant sense of otherness and uncertainty that accompany Wallace’s passage through the world around him. He’s incredibly smart, but this sometimes works against him as it makes him hyper aware of the microagressions that surround him. Nothing about this reading experience is easy, and it definitely isn’t comfortable. Wallace’s life is complicated, and both his history and his present are tinged with violence. There is a similarity in tone to Hanya Yanagihara’s much-maligned A Little Life (one I had very conflicted feelings about, and wasn’t really that happy to emotionally re-visit) – the close group of friends, the one who has an abusive past the others don’t know about and can’t understand, the social isolation and feeling of hopelessness. This book is nowhere near as dark, but it shares some of the same emotional territory.
I had a brief chat about this book with Greg from one of my favourite YouTube channels, Supposedly Fun. He really loved this book, whereas I had a less positive experience of reading it. He pointed out two things that helped me contextualize this book. The first is that it’s a portrait of depression. As soon as he said that it was like something clicked into place, because of course Wallace is depressed. He can’t act to deal with any of the challenging aspects of his life, because depression has him feeling powerless and hopeless (his experiences and the racism he constantly has to deal with compound this). The second thing he pointed out is that it very purposely does not offer a conclusion. Nothing in this book works out in the end, nothing is tied in any kind of bow, neat or otherwise. Greg pointed out that he thinks this is a purposeful statement – in life sometimes all we have are crappy options. This book definitely captures that truth.
I can’t say this was my favourite book of the year. Not because of the subject matter or the lack of a satisfying ending, but because I just could not connect to Wallace and I found the writing more dense and descriptive than it needed to be, particularly at the beginning. I think this was just a me thing – other readers have found the opposite. But for me, I felt like Wallace’s need to keep the people around him at arm’s length, as understandable as it was, went triple for me as the reader.
That said, this book was unlike anything else I’ve read this year – or last. It does a good job of grappling with its main issues – race, isolation, belonging, trauma, uncertainty. There is promise in this, and I am curious to see what Taylor will write in the future. I think that if you are a reader who can connect without a connection being offered to you, or who can appreciate deliberate and descriptive prose, this is definitely a book you need to check out.
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. – Goodreads
Book Title: Real Life
Author: Brandon Taylor
Series: No
Edition: Paperback/Audiobook
Published By: Riverhead Books
Released: February 18, 2020
Genre: Fiction, College, Relationships, Race, LGBTQIA+
Pages: 329
Date Read: April 3-6, 2021
Rating: 6/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 3.88/5 (17,384 ratings)
My BookTube Prize Ranking: 6th out of 6
One thought on “THE SUNDAY REVIEW | REAL LIFE – BRANDON TAYLOR”