What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 31 reviews

Real Life

Brandon Taylor

What The Reviewers Say

Positive

Based on 31 reviews

Real Life

Brandon Taylor

Rave
Jenny O. Harris,
The New York Times Book Review
In Taylor’s stunning debut, Real Life, quiet diligence toward one’s goals mutates into a spiral that leaves the mind and body bruised as if survivors of a psychic war zone.
Rave
Kaitlyn Greenridge,
VQR
Brandon Taylor’s Real Life is both a break from this tired obsession with 'realness' [of Blackness] and a meditation on what it might mean in a fuller sense, outside of a reductive understanding. It is less a novel steeped in the subconscious anti-Blackness of highbrow art and realist literature and more one in conversation with questions of personhood and social death.
Rave
Malcolm Forbes,
The Star Tribune
... [a] bravura first novel.
Rave
Michael Arceneaux,
TIME
Taylor unearths these layered struggles with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last.
Rave
T.S. Mendola,
Los Angeles Review of Books
Bounded in time by a single weekend, held in tension by Taylor’s spare, restrained syntax, and given no more than a handful of central characters who continue to find new ways to hurt each other, Real Life by rights should read like a closed-in, misanthropic comedy in five acts. It never shades into that closed-in misanthropy, managing instead to maintain an astounding naturalistic sensibility: we are less comfortably watching these characters in a glassed-in trap of the author’s own making than we are drawn into their inner lives, even when those lives are racist, selfish, or violent. The novel shares DNA with Mrs. Dalloway in this way: Taylor’s parsimony with time, facility with simile, and precise measure of the human heart are a match for Woolf’s.
Rave
Anthony Cummins,
The Guardian (UK)
... crisply narrated.
Rave
Sarah Neilson,
Lambda Literary
The interplay between the removed perspective of a bird in flight and the corporeal, vital connection of the flock creates a kind of dance where the prose is like bird tracks in snow. The reader both soars above it all and gets hit in the face with the violence of a hollow bone snap.
Positive
Eren Orbey,
The New Yorker
... a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines.
Positive
Taylor Poulos,
Guernica Magazine
Taylor revels in descriptions of breeding nematodes and running protein preps. The language of biochemistry in the novel is deft, a fluency no doubt acquired during Taylor’s own graduate studies in that field.
Rave
Stephenie Harrison,
BookPage
... a devastating wallop of a debut novel. Impressive in its economy.
Rave
Claire Jarvis,
Bookforum
There is a way to use a novel to preach to a choir, to those who denounce the wrongdoing of others while ignoring their own culpability. Brandon Taylor’s Real Life refuses this kind of solace. It is a political novel, but it is quiet, careful, and fully attuned to the ways people—nice, normal people—are utter and irredeemable assholes.
Positive
Constance Grady,
Vox
Taylor’s descriptive sentences can be so affectless as to read as terse, even though grammatically he tends toward the long and complex. It’s not that his prose doesn’t make you feel things; it’s that Wallace, in whose head we are placed in a close third-person perspective, is trying very hard not to feel things, and most of what he does feel is depression. So instead of telling us his feelings, he shares his observations.
Mixed
Charles Arrowsmith,
The Washington Post
Taylor broadens the embrace of the traditional campus novel.
Positive
Eric Nguyen,
Ploughshares
That each person is a world unto themselves makes for the tension that emanates from this skillful novel—and Taylor is a master of tension. He has a talent for slowing down scenes, scanning its landscape for gestures that might or might not be imbued with meaning, watching for the exact moment where the mood switches and everything changes.
Positive
Michael Donkor,
The Guardian (UK)
... formally and conceptually testing.
Rave
Barry Pierce,
The Irish Times (IRE)
... unquestionably the queer novel of the year.
Positive
David Canfield,
Entertainment Weekly
Taylor writes under the weight of trauma in his debut novel, winding from despair toward something close to hope.
Rave
Jessi Rae Morton,
Southern Review of Books
Brandon Taylor's debut...precisely captures both the dreamy atmosphere and gritty competitiveness of graduate school with stunning grace.
Positive
Aaron Coats,
The Chicago Review of Books
The most important element of Taylor’s work is without a doubt his use of language. Although Wallace experiences numerous atrocities, Taylor somehow keeps us evenly paced and able to withstand the horror. Wallace has trouble expressing and even defending himself in the moment, but Taylor suffers no such failing. Wallace’s internal dialogue is razor sharp on his feelings about what’s happening.
Rave
Hannah Calkins,
Shelf Awareness
Real Life...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.
Positive
Bethanne Patrick,
The Los Angeles Times
[Taylor's] voice might best be described as a controlled roar of rage and pain, its energy held together by the careful thinking of a mind accustomed to good behavior.
Positive
Paul Mendez,
London Review of Books (UK)
Glints of humour provide occasional respite from the weightiness.
Rave
Lucy Scholes,
The Times Literary Supplement (UK)
... astonishingly accomplished.
Positive
Jemimah Wei,
Columbia Journal
Taylor approaches Real Life with...precision.
Mixed
Tomiwa Owolade,
The Times (UK)
Taylor describes the surrounding scenery with sharp focus. The prose is exact and clear; Taylor has a keen sensitivity for surface detail. Indeed, surface description and the visual gaze are important features of the narrative.
Positive
Sylvia OHara,
The Indiependent
... a precise and intimate narrative about coping with childhood trauma.
Rave
Palash Mahmud,
The Punch
... electrifying.
Rave
Mike McClelland,
Spectrum Culture
As gay black man from the South in the halls of Midwestern academia, Wallace is targeted in large and small ways by these people. And what Taylor shows so powerfully through Wallace is the burden of choices placed upon him by this treatment.
Rave
Annie Bostrom,
Booklist
Taylor translates Wallace’s thoughts and conversations with a rare fluidity and writes breathlessly physical scenes, all of which adds to the charged experience of reading his steadily exciting and affecting debut; it’s an experience in itself. He works a needle through Wallace’s knots of race, class, and love, stopping after loosening their loops and making hidden intricacies visible, but before neatly untying them..
Positive
Kirkus
Microaggression' is a term anyone paying attention to race and gender issues in America has heard, but in this flinty debut novel, there’s nothing micro about them.
Positive
Publishers Weekly
Taylor’s intense, introspective debut tackles the complicated desires of a painfully introverted gay black graduate student over the course of a tumultuous weekend.