Real Life

I was really looking forward to this new novel. It got great reviews by well respected critics, and the idea of the story, a young black, gay guy in a doctoral program that was very predominately white, and all that that would entail, looked very promising. Reading a little of the into the book, it was looking like it was well written, poetic, and a very interesting subject.

A little less than half way through Real Life, I had had it! And I did not waste any more time trying to slog through it.
Poetic, interesting prose is always a plus in novels. However, here, the author seemed to use everything he had ever thought of, in terms of colorful language, and plaster it into every sentence he could. After a while, you wished he would just have a simple sentence, where one thing was just what it was, not representational of something much more poetic.

There was so much talk about disecting worms, and other miniature bio stuff under a microscope, that it just got tiring. Also, When well written, sex scenes in novels can be very erotic and sensual. Here, his description of sexual encounters was just boring. Made me wonder if the author had ever had a great sexual experience himself. And finally, the novel did not seem to really be heading in any direction that would have brought it all together. I did peek at the last part of the story, and it did not seem to have gotten any better by then.

What’s sad here, is there was so much promise for a great novel in the idea of this story. All sorts of offshoots of the story could have been told and made it much better.

I want to give Brandon Taylor full marks for being a wonderful writer. He has a lovely style even if he does occasionally slide into MFAishness. But this novel centers on a group of vapid graduate students and their very tiny triumphs and tragedies. There is no plot. If you enjoy the misery of young adulthood and the search for self, this book is for you. Some reviews I have read have noted that this novel is singular because the central character is black and gay, but he’s not any more miserable, whiny, and boring than a white, hetero character would be in the same book.

I was looking forward to this because I’d heard a lot of good things about it, but found myself very disappointed. There are so many characters it is hard to keep track of who is who, and many seemingly serve no real purpose or easily could have been combined together to create a richer reading experience.

The back and forth with Wallace’s time in the lab was also distracting to me. There’s in depth descriptions of him working with his petri dishes that goes on for many pages and I felt it added very little to the story. Wallace is not a very likable main character to follow, and while this may be the author’s intention, I found it a struggle to care about what happened to him.

The only part of the story I really found interesting was the budding relationship between Miller and Wallace, but that quickly turns very ugly in the end and is a bit hard to read about due to the violence portrayed. As a gay man, I am finding it a bit tiresome that commercially published authors keep showcasing these kinds of dysfunctional, abusive gay relationships. Where is the love? It would be great if more healthy, compassionate gay relationships were published by the big five. That is what I would like to see more of. Not this.

I do not recommend this book.

While I agree that the writing in this book is good, the main character is self-pitying and almost impossible to continue reading about. The rest of the characters weren’t exactly well-defined either. It’s a journey, but it’s one of my least favorite books of the year.

Brandon Taylor’s book about Wallace, a graduate student, and his lab colleagues, is stunning. A wonderful look at the routines of pressures for an academic, it is primarily an accounting of the buttoned-up Wallace. His perceptions of the world around him are incisive and offer him a way to not-feel the “real” life he is living. I had to stop reading frequently, just to absorb the depth of feeling and insight that Taylor manifests in bringing Wallace to his real life. This book is a book of the decade, perhaps a book of the century.

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