Taylor is unsparing in his depiction of the harsh competitiveness of graduate student life in research labs: the long hours of demanding work and the constant toll of being judged by peers and mentors. Like a classical tragedy, events unfold over a dramatic late summer weekend, which, along with flashbacks to the past, shake the bearings of Wallace’s tenuous sense of identity forged during his four years of graduate student life. The setting of Real Life is modeled after Madison, Wisconsin, a college town by Midwestern lakes, the setting where the protagonist, Wallace, a young, Black, and gay graduate student arrives from Alabama to make for himself a new life as a biochemistry researcher. Award nominations are often mired in the politics of selection, but Real Life undoubtedly deserves the attention it is receiving for expressing in luminous prose the ongoing struggles of Black lives on the margins of predominantly white spaces like research universities and liberal communities ostensibly open to diverse sexual orientations. 327 pages.ĪS A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, has already achieved the status of one of the best novels of 2020.
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