None of these readings are wrong, exactly. Real Life can be construed as a book about the central themes of coming of age or racism in the academy. Generically speaking, it is a “ campus life” novel, where the central character happens to be a gay black man. Wallace, having spent his entire summer working until midnight under the fluorescent lights of the lab, decides that after this disaster, he might as well “meet his friends at the pier after all.” From there, the web of relationships into which he has fallen - over his five years in the program - starts to unravel, until he is left Monday morning facing the dawn, uncertain whether he will “leap out of his life and into the vast, incalculable void of the world.” In other words, when the weekend - and the novel - ends, “real life” begins. It is hard to explain to a humanist quite how traumatic this discovery would be: imagine, for instance, that someone burned your book manuscript, destroyed your laptop, then sent a poison-pen letter to your publisher. Wallace, a doctoral candidate in biochemistry, arrives to his lab to find his latest experiment - the result of months of painstaking work and a key part of his senior colleague’s dissertation - sabotaged. Wallace, though he is in an American university and was raised in an American state and town, experiences the world he finds himself in as a foreign country: the problem of the novel is what to do when you feel like an immigrant in a country you ostensibly belong to? It’s a remarkable debut, and I’m excited to read his next book(s).BRANDON TAYLOR’S REAL LIFE follows one late-summer weekend in a Midwestern university town. I had always connected that impulse to those writers’ investments in and reading of existentialist philosophy, but when reading Taylor’s novel, I thought of it in relation to expatriation more broadly. In Wright and Baldwin, characters often vomit, especially after tense exchanges.

There is a psychological element to this characterization - the character has very disordered eating, due to his painful and impoverished childhood, but it serves as a metaphorical connection to a whole swath of Black expatriate novels from the 1950s and 60s. He throws up, and feels like throwing up, repeatedly in the novel. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is nauseated. I cut an observation from this review that I’ve been thinking about since I filed it. I reviewed Brandon Taylor’s debut Real Life for Bookforum.

Real life brandon