Real Life by Brandon Taylor review / Violent legacy of the past

 

BOOKS OF THE YEAR

Real Life by Brandon Taylor review – violent legacy of the past

This Booker-longlisted snapshot of the life of a queer black postgraduate forcefully tackles the effects of racism and abuse

Michael Donkor
Fri 21 Aug 2020 09.00 BST

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allace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude. On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake. He dangles his feet in the ripples. He enjoys the bracing freshness. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat. Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”.

With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is also a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths. Set over a late summer weekend, the novel is a snapshot of Wallace’s life in the aftermath of his father’s recent death. Early on in the narrative, Wallace’s friends discover that his father passed away a few weeks ago. Wallace told no one about this, nor did he attend his father’s funeral.

As the story unfolds, Taylor explores the difficult underpinnings of this response to loss. As well as processing grief, Wallace is forced to navigate other challenges. He suffers from a kind of existential ennui: his commitment to the scientific research he is undertaking is wavering. This unease is only exacerbated when important genetic experiments he has been working on are tampered with. Wallace also finds himself negotiating a fraught romance with his friend Miller, a complicated “jock” type. With its uneasy power dynamic, this volatile relationship provides a nuanced portrayal of gay desire reminiscent of the frictions between Little Dog and Trevor in Ocean Vuong’s stunning On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.

Brandon Taylor. Photograph: 2020 Booker Prize/Bill Adams/PA

Wallace’s principal struggle throughout the novel is with the legacy of sexual violence. Taylor sensitively records his protagonist’s attempts to excavate these deeply buried personal tragedies. In terms of craft, the passage in which Wallace reveals the horrors of his past is a disturbing, virtuosic piece of writing. He remembers how, when terrifying tempests shredded Alabama skies, his dysfunctional family told him “stories or sang spirituals. They told [him] of the Bible and how the flood came upon the land and drowned all the wicked, and how [he’d] be next […] The house stank of [their] sweat and piss and the bathroom always smelled of shit because [they] kept the used toilet paper in a little can … And in that house, fetid and stinking and sweating, [he] learned all about the ways that a person can do God great ill.” This pivotal recollection is a relentless battery of troubling motifs: broken bodies, rotting vegetation, decaying birds. The quasi-gothic stretch of prose powerfully speaks both of the darkness of what Wallace endured as a child and his difficulty in giving it linguistic shape as an adult.

Taylor’s treatment of racial politics in the novel is sophisticated and forceful too. Wallace astutely diagnoses the ways his privileged white peers “have a vested interest in underestimating racism”; the depictions of the micro and macroaggressions he faces as he moves through a predominantly white world are figured with piercing accuracy. The fiery exchange when a straight white lab partner uses the N-word to describe the status of women, while also declaring them “the new faggots”, is one of a series of poignant occasions when the intersectional complexities of Wallace’s identity are weaponised against him.

In his quests to evade such hostilities and to “slip out of [his] own skin”, Wallace finds peace not just amid the calm of the lake but in contemplating other elements of the natural world. He “thinks again of a bird, the matter of scope, how everything below it, all the big and towering world, is both flattened and shrunken”.

These images, and their concern with perspective and distance, reveal aspects of Wallace’s characterisation that might discourage readers. Taylor is committed to precisely portraying Wallace’s inner life and lived experience as a deeply withdrawn individual, born no doubt from Wallace’s history of abuse. This dedication to psychological verisimilitude involves showing that, for victims, progressing beyond trauma is not always possible. It also involves asserting that people, often and especially those closest to us, might be unknowable. These tendencies mean that, by the end of the book, the narrative often has a somewhat inert, ponderous quality, and Wallace feels curiously indistinct. Ultimately, Taylor renders Wallace always at a remove from us; a figure frustratingly out of reach.

• Real Life is published by Daunt Originals (£8.99).

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