Real Life

November 4, 2019
Taylor’s intense, introspective debut tackles the complicated desires of a painfully introverted gay black graduate student over the course of a tumultuous weekend. Wallace, a biochemistry student from Alabama at an unnamed contemporary Midwestern university, discovers his experiment involving breeding nematodes ruined by contaminating mold. Though distraught and facing tedious work, he reluctantly meets up with friends from his program to celebrate the last weekend of summer. He discloses to them the recent death of his estranged father, who did not protect him from sexual abuse by a family friend as a child. Wallace is perpetually ill at ease with his white friends and labmates, especially surly Miller, who unexpectedly admits a sexual interest in Wallace. Over the following two days, Wallace and Miller awkwardly begin a secret, volatile sexual relationship with troubling violence between them at its margins. As Wallace begins to doubt his future as an academic and continues to have fraught social interactions, he reveals more about his heartbreaking past to Miller, building toward an unsettling, unresolved conclusion between the two men. Wallace’s inconsistent emotional states when he’s in Miller’s company can be jarring; the novel is at its best and most powerful when Wallace is alone and readers witness his interior solitude in the face of the racism and loneliness he endures. Taylor’s perceptive, challenging exploration of the many kinds of emotional costs will resonate with readers looking for complex characters and rich prose. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, DeFiore and Company.

January 1, 2020
A young gay black man comes of age at a moment when American culture feels bitter and closefisted. Wallace is a graduate student in the Midwest, desperate for his genetic experiments on nematodes to be successful. He'd also like some semblance of a relationship with Miller to work out, never having had a boyfriend before; meanwhile, Miller isn't certain he's gay. Having just arrived from Alabama, Wallace has a lot of whiteness to adjust to. His friends are white; so are his colleagues. He notes the "tasteless, strained, diluted flavor of white people food." "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, as when a Machiavellian female colleague who may be sabotaging Wallace's experiments tells him that "I have to prove myself because you and men like you are always counting me out" and then goes on a dizzying bender of benighted cultural appropriation. (The fact that it feels unresolved whether she is his saboteur is a fault in the novel.) Or when a French grad student alludes to Wallace's "deficiencies," i.e., the facts that he grew up black and poor. Taylor deserves admiration for making it so clear how racism and homophobia feel: "When you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth," for example. The novel, by a staff writer at Lit Hub, has generated a lot of buzz, and its unflinching forays into our culture wars are cleareyed. Beyond its status as a testament of political injustice, though, it deserves accolades for its insights into the ways trauma hollows out a person's soul. The novel ends on a note of hope as Wallace and his new friends are toasting one another by the lake at the end of summer, but, as one in a tradition of searing novels about gay men, it's better read for its chill: "Is this all his life is meant to be, the accumulation of other people's pain?" Wallace wonders. Telling the truth, bleakly.

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February 1, 2020

DEBUT Wallace is a fish out of water, and he knows it. A gay black man from Alabama in a Midwestern university graduate biochemistry program peopled with white and Asian American students, Wallace is awkwardly unique and alone. The problem? So is everyone else. Through language wizardry, essayist and short story writer Taylor's debut novel encapsulates in one weekend a life that is by turns alien, welcoming, and violent while it seems all too painfully real. Wallace is in and out of relations with his small circle of friends and enemies, and his "real life" is one of unrelenting angst, his relationships strained, including a violent one with a man who insists he is not gay. The faculty head of his program begins to wonder whether Wallace should even be there. He hates it all. VERDICT As brilliantly written as the novel is, the constant conflicts, unyielding anguish, and pages of tortured ruminations that anchor the narrative in "real life" might wear out the less-than-committed reader. It's a relief that Taylor concludes with a hopeful flashback to Wallace's matriculation, when friendships are new and promising. A demanding if rewarding work. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]--Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

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Starred review from November 1, 2019
It's a summer weekend in a Midwestern university town and biochemistry grad student Wallace is just weeks past losing his dad, and moments past losing weeks' worth of lab data. When his friends?who are all white and mostly fellow biochem students?find out about his dad, they can't believe Wallace is okay (he didn't go back to Alabama for the funeral) and desperately want to comfort him. This tension, just one of the burners Taylor ignites in the slowly unfolding opening scene, simmers for the book's duration and deepens as readers get to know Wallace and his highly honed abilities of self-preservation. When he and his friend Miller, who's straight, consummate their attraction and pierce one another's tough outer shells in the process, neither is quite ready for what pours out: buried cruelties that, while completely different, bond them. 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, before neatly untying them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)