Real Life Review

Brendan Taylor’s debut novel Real Life made it onto the 2020 Booker Prize Shortlist for good reasons. In Real Life Taylor decides to tackle on race, sexuality, gender, realationships, and emotional issues and trauma through his main character Wallace, a gay, black, graduate student in the Midwest. The most modern of the three books I have read so far, Real Life sets out to take on more present day issues that are rooted deep in the past. 

Real Life follows the life of Wallace over the course of a weekend spent in the labs of his graduate school, at events with friends and some time spent alone. Right from the book’s stunner of an opening line – “It was a cool evening in late summer when Wallace, his father dead for several weeks, decided that he would meet his friends at the pier after all” – Real Life is shaped by how emotion influences our inner and outer lives. Taylor conveys the inner minefield that Wallace must navigate as a result of how his friends, acquaintances and colleagues treat him. As gay black man from the South in the halls of Midwestern academia, Wallace is targeted in large and small ways by these people. These microaggressions shine throughout the novel quietly under some other comments and stories, but they are always there and that is how Taylor shows so powerfully through Wallace is the burden of choices placed upon him by this treatment. He must consider what to say, when to arrive, how to move and so much more, in constant, exhausting fashion. He must do all of this while considering what the bigger picture is for him, while it seems that other people simply get to move forward, make mistakes, and keeping going. “This too could be his life,” he considers at one critical juncture.

Wallace must consider all of this while wondering where he belongs. And it’s a profound consideration, particularly when Wallace doesn’t feel like he belongs, either where he’s from or where he’s gone to. His self-examination mostly plays out in third person, which, along with the campus locale, lovely environmental details and concise, one-weekend temporal setting lends a cinematic quality to Real Life. Taylor so impressively renders character movement and facial reactions that you can feel his camera panning in and out to capture the most important details.

A novel that is starting to pick up some buzz as to make it to film soon, it makes me wonder about the intentions for the novel. Was this created more so as a ploy to make it on to the big screen? Did Taylor go into this with monetary gain and fame as the end goal? Everyone knows what happens when a book makes it to the movies, you go and see it and read the book or vice versus read the book and then see it in the movies. I doubt Taylor had these intentions at first, but it does come to question the setting of a quick weekend with friends, in a college town, something that is more modern that would work well with older audiences. This doesn’t quite bring down the legitimacy of the novel or the writing properties but it is something to think about as with many books to big screen movies.

Something that I didn’t like too much was the pacing and the way that the book was separated into sections. I felt as though I had to really think about the timing in the novel as I was reading, especially throughout the first 100 pages or so. I didn’t feel as though it was going through a weekend because of the pacing and the speed at which Wallace was going through his life. Everything felt a little bit off for me when I was reading and trying to understand where I was in relation to the beginning. I think something that the separation of “chapters” also made it a little bit difficult to pace it, the “chapters” being separated by only a large space didn’t click in my mind as a whole new section. That may be more so on me than a commonly held view of the book, but it made it more difficult than it would have been if done in a more traditional sense. 

Brandon Taylor, writes Real Life incredibly well for it being his debut novel and I can see a lot more coming from him in the future. The novel covers many interesting topics and situations that the characters are thrown into throughout the book. I do believe that this could be a teachable novel if used in a college level course, because it does require a more mature mind to be able to read, I don’t think I could have read this in high school. This book could be used in a race or gender/sexaul identity course fairly easily I think. I would say that Real Life is a compelling story with many great situations and characters, but it does seem to be more of a movie of short television series, the way that the drama is written and portrayed seems to be more fitting for the screen. The setting of the novel being modern, a college town, and the characters being students is a little more easily to connect to than some of the other novels so far, but even with that said I would think that I would have to rate Real Life at a 6.4/10.