Real Life
Brandon Taylor
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Real Life
Brandon Taylor
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
Rave
Positive
Mixed
Pan
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.
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.
... [a] bravura first novel.
Taylor unearths these layered struggles with tenderness and complexity, from the first gorgeous sentence of his book to its very last.
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.
... crisply narrated.
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.
... a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines.
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.
... a devastating wallop of a debut novel. Impressive in its economy.
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.
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.
Taylor broadens the embrace of the traditional campus novel.
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.
... formally and conceptually testing.
... unquestionably the queer novel of the year.
Taylor writes under the weight of trauma in his debut novel, winding from despair toward something close to hope.
Brandon Taylor's debut...precisely captures both the dreamy atmosphere and gritty competitiveness of graduate school with stunning grace.
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.
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.
[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.
Glints of humour provide occasional respite from the weightiness.
... astonishingly accomplished.
Taylor approaches Real Life with...precision.
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.
... a precise and intimate narrative about coping with childhood trauma.
... electrifying.
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.
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..
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.
Taylor’s intense, introspective debut tackles the complicated desires of a painfully introverted gay black graduate student over the course of a tumultuous weekend.