Time March 2–9, 2020TimeOff Books
in Brandon Taylor’s highly
anticipated novel Real Life, protagonist
Wallace —Southern, black and gay—has
left behind his family and their fraught
shared history to pursue graduate stud-
ies in biochemistry at a predominantly
white Midwestern university. The novel
unfolds over three long days spent in
and out of the lab, diving into the daily
indignities Wallace faces in a quietly
toxic environment.
Wallace finds himself stressed by the
discovery that his experiment, breed-
ing nematode worms, has been ruined
by mold; we wonder, perhaps, if it was
the work of a saboteur. Still, he chooses
to celebrate the last weekend of sum-
mer with friends from his program. But
as the only black person among this
clique of academics, he maintains an
uneasiness around the group, keeping
largely to himself. He could make more
of an effort to hang, he knows, but given
his peers’ casual displays of prejudice,
projection and general lack of aware-
ness, it’s easy to understand why he’s
wary. These so-called friends, after all,
are guilty of shades of aggression from
micro to macro, and none ever come to
his defense. As Taylor writes, “There
will always be good white people who
love him and want the best for him but
who are more afraid of other white peo-
ple than of letting him down.”
This would be enough to justify the
distance Wallace maintains. But he’s
burdened with so much more: what
Wallace’s friends don’t know is that his
father recently died, a loss that is com-
plicated by the fact that the man had
failed to protect his young son from sex-
ual abuse. Taylor unearths these layered
struggles with tenderness and complex-
ity, from the first gorgeous sentence of
his book to its very last.
Some of uS carry our past much fur-
ther than we imagined we would. We
think we’ve buried it or, even better,
made our peace with it. And then, life
reveals otherwise. Reading Real Life—
which is equal parts captivating, erotic,
smart and vivid—reminded me of experiences from my own
history: I had no clue how much I actually wanted love until I
met someone whose love I felt I couldn’t live without.
For Wallace, it’s a budding relationship with Miller—an
ostensibly straight, white man in his friend group, with de-
mons of his own—that helps him begin to recognize that he
longs for affection as much as anyone. Their dynamic, as it
unfolds, is both confusing and volatile. Relationships be-
tween queer men and men who are straight—or at least who
present as such—can be difficult to depict, when our culture
is so rigid in its portrayal of sexuality and masculinity, but the
ambiguity Taylor creates on the page between Wallace and
Miller is devastatingly effective.
Taylor’s book isn’t about overcoming trauma or the perils
of academia or even just the experience of inhabiting a black
body in a white space, even as Real Life does cover these
subjects. Taylor is also tackling loneliness, desire and—more
than anything—finding purpose, meaning and happiness
in one’s own life. What makes it most special, though, is
that Real Life is told from the perspective of Wallace, who,
like so many other gay black men I know, understands how
such a quest is further complicated by racism, poverty and
homophobia. Such is often the case with publishing itself, an
industry that is only now releasing works from queer black
men. How fortunate we are for Real Life, another stunning
contribution from a community long deserving of the chance
to tell its stories.Arceneaux is the author of the essay collections I Can’t Date
Jesus and the forthcoming I Don’t Want to Die PoorREVIEW
Experiment in
self-discovery
By Michael Arceneaux
△
Taylor was a
biochemistry
graduate student,
like his protagonist,
when he started
drafting his novel