Wallace’s principal struggle throughout the novel is with the legacy of sexual violence. With its uneasy power dynamic, this volatile relationship provides a nuanced portrayal of gay desire reminiscent of the frictions between Little Dog and Trevor in Ocean Vuong’s stunning On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous.īrandon Taylor. Photograph: 2020 Booker Prize/Bill Adams/PA Wallace also finds himself negotiating a fraught romance with his friend Miller, a complicated “jock” type. This unease is only exacerbated when important genetic experiments he has been working on are tampered with. He suffers from a kind of existential ennui: his commitment to the scientific research he is undertaking is wavering. As well as processing grief, Wallace is forced to navigate other challenges.
Wallace told no one about this, nor did he attend his father’s funeral.Īs the story unfolds, Taylor explores the difficult underpinnings of this response to loss. Early on in the narrative, Wallace’s friends discover that his father passed away a few weeks ago. Set over a late summer weekend, the novel is a snapshot of Wallace’s life in the aftermath of his father’s recent death. With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is also a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths.
Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat.
On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake. A llace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude.
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