Real Life, the debut novel by Electric Literature's Recommended Reading senior editor Brandon Taylor, has all the notes of a classic "campus novel." It's got academic in-fighting. It's got complex hierarchies--and an associated web of alliances and betrayals--that link friends, lovers and rivals. And, most importantly to qualify for the genre, it's got a vaguely threatening undercurrent roiling beneath a placid collegiate surface. But Real Life tells a story that the others don't, and thus is starkly more "real" than its peers.
Wallace is black, gay and Southern at a large (and largely white) Midwestern university. He is in the trenches of a graduate program in biochemistry--far enough into the program that he's become brutally disillusioned by academia, but not far enough for graduation to be in sight. Reserved and self-protective, he is both completely consumed by the insular universe of his graduate program and apart from it, which only intensifies his sense of seclusion.
Some of this isolation is self-imposed, as Wallace has learned that his survival is dependent on maintaining impenetrable emotional defenses. His friends, absorbed in their own personal and professional dramas, don't understand how racist and homophobic forces have corroded his life. And they don't know that he is quietly buckling under the secret weight of grief and trauma.
On the last weekend of summer, minor disaster strikes in his lab, he is chastised and shamed by his colleagues, and he begins a precipitous, tense affair with an ostensibly straight friend. These events, and their implications, threaten to annihilate Wallace's careful defenses, another wound from which he may never recover.
"That has been the lesson this weekend, hasn't it?" Wallace reflects near the end of the book. "The misery of other people, the persistence of unhappiness, is all that connects them. Only the prospect of greater unhappiness keeps them within the circumscribed world of graduate school."
But if there is joy in Real Life, it is in Taylor's elegant, thoughtful prose. Without assuming too much overlap between art and author, it's worth noting that Taylor is black, gay, from Alabama and an alumnus of the biochemistry program at the University of Wisconsin, signaling his deep familiarity with the disjunction between Wallace's internal and external experiences.
Real Life ends on a note of hope in reverse. With shattering elegance, Taylor suggests that the tolls of abuse and institutional subjugation are malignant and inescapable. --Hannah Calkins, writer and editor
Shelf Talker: In this powerful and heartbreaking novel, a black, gay graduate student reckons with the trauma, racism and homophobia that have shaped his life.