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    Real Life: A Novel
    Real Life: A Novel
    Real Life: A Novel
    Audiobook9 hours

    Real Life: A Novel

    Written by Brandon Taylor

    Narrated by Kevin R. Free

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award 
     
    “A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine

    Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness

    A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
    Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.  
     
    Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Audio
    Release dateFeb 18, 2020
    ISBN9780593166765
    Author

    Brandon Taylor

    Brandon Taylor is the author of the novels Real Life (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize) and The Late Americans and the short-story collection Filthy Animals (awarded the Story Prize and shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize).

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    Reviews for Real Life

    3.5/5

    173 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I didn't quite enjoy this, but then again I am not overly fond of clearly autobiographical, "social issue" novels by debut novelists. Still, these are the core concerns of the vast majority of debut novelists, so I can't complain too much. My doubts were more to do with the emptiness of many of the characters and the overall milieu; perhaps I am just becoming too aged and decrepit to care about the easily emotional lives of the youth?

      Lest I sound cruel, Taylor's literary style is exacting, beautiful, often poignant, able to conjure up realistic social moments of the zeitgeist as competently as more lyrical emotional passages. I will be keen to read what Taylor does next.
    • 3/5
      Repetitively painful, cant understand how it received a Booker nomination. Get on with your "real life", in the laboratory. Also get "real friends".
    • 3/5
      When I look at the ratings people have given this book I feel like I must have been listening to a different book. Despite the title the plot of this book is about as far from "real life' as I could ever imagine. The main character, Wallace, is a gay black man working on his doctoral thesis in a predominately white university town. The premise sounds good but it didn't work for me. Wallace may or may not finish his lab work for his thesis but he doesn't seem too worried about all the problems he encounters. He may or may not be in love with Miller who may or may not be heterosexual. He may or may not be grieving for his recently deceased father. He just didn't seem to have any firm feelings or beliefs so he didn't seem "real" to me.
    • 4/5
      Wallace leads a life completely alien to my own experience yet Taylor's choice to not single out any one aspect of Wallace's identity created a multidimensional, relatable protagonist. I felt the author captured that time in life where you are headed down a road and begin to see that there may a fork in the not-to-distant future.
    • 4/5
      I loved the first three-quarters of this book and was full of anticipation about where Taylor was going to go with it, but in the last quarter it lost me and turned me off.

      Wallace, the protagonist, is mentally sliding into a bleak place over the course of the weekend that the book is centred around. A minority black and gay man in a predominantly white Midwestern US grad school, his feelings of not belonging - both socially and academically - come to a head in a weekend of despair and confusion as he puts the barriers up higher between himself and his closest circle of friends, all the while embarking on a new sexual relationship with one of his straight male friends.

      Yes, I know this is supposedly a novel of great depth about wounds and being fractured and being on the outside looking in, but in the end I grew tired of being 'told' by the main character of his great inability to fit in and his terrible childhood trauma, all in the midst of a bizarre sudden intense relationship with the rough, straight guy that he gets on with the least out of his friends.

      I could feel no sympathy for Wallace by the end of Taylor's handling. He was a depressed guy who wasn't happy with where he was and knew of no other direction to go in, but I really couldn't have cared either way by the end. It all felt a bit directionless and flat.

      3.5 stars - a strong start but lost my attention somewhere along the way.
    • 5/5
      This was a hard book for me. It portrays the feelings and dynamics of grad school vividly -- even though my experiences were in a different discipline. Its use of imagery and attention to how people move and awareness of group dynamics is meticulous and effective. It addresses racism devastatingly well. The descriptions of violence were every difficult to read, though, and I was not sure how to react to Wallace and Miller's relationship. Sometimes there was too much parsing and describing and too much bad communication ...
    • 3/5
      Saying this book is bleak is like saying living next door to someone who practices playing the digeridoo several hours every day (true story) is irritating. Its a true statement, but such a stunning understatement that it ends up being false. This is bleak for the sake of being bleak. Into every life a little sunshine must fall, except for Wallace. Nothing pleasing ever happens to him or if it does he covers it in shit and tears.

      I love great prose and Taylor's writing, at the sentence level, is some of the best I have ever read. Like,Tolstoy good, in parts. He conjures a scene beautifully, uses metaphor creatively and seamlessly, dazzles with the use of simple declarative language that sounds both exactly like and nothing like things you have read before. 5 stars for language-craft (other than dialogue, but more about that later.) I have thought about this, and the book's shortcomings may become clearer with time, but here are the things I think are primarily to blame for this not being a great read.

      Wallace is humorless and has a personality as flat as a pancake. We are all friendly with people at work because we work with them, but often we don't really like them, and I think everyone in Wallace's work based "friend group" dislikes him and doesn't want to admit it. Wallace's friends do all sorts of things together and don't invite him. He understands it is because he often declines and that appears to be against the rules. Perhaps that is part of the reason, but mostly I imagine it is because he is unpleasant to be around. I get that he is shaped by the horrors of his childhood, by the casual and sometimes subconscious racism and homophobia he faces every day in academia, by living in a place alien to him, where he does not know the rules of engagement. That is all heartbreaking, and likely quite real, but the primary problem is that Wallace is a big fat bummer all the time. He never says anything clever or funny or insightful or provocative or caring or intended to incite a conversation. Mostly he says nothing, and when he does speak what he says is hurtful or disruptive or bitchy and self-involved. Because he sees things, always, in a way that suits his dark world view he is a pretty unreliable narrator, and that made me wonder if perhaps he was not very good at his job. He certainly does not seem even remotely excited by the work he is doing, and behaves more like a lab tech than a doctoral student most of the time. I am not downplaying how imposter syndrome and the steady flow of microaggressions might negatively impact his performance. (I am old, and was the only female attorney at my firm for a number of years. I was regularly asked to get coffee and not given juicy matters because they would take me away from my fiancé/husband. This damaged my career and my sense of self. The partners' assumptions that I was there to serve rather than advance, that my intimate relationship was my first priority so I must have lacked professional drive, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. I know personally that this is real, and exponentially more intense for black professionals than it is/was for women.) If that is what was happening in the story I don't think Taylor wrote it well. I think he wanted the reader to think Wallace was incredibly talented, and that the low-key racists and bitchy feminists with all their talk of misogyny were out to get him. All I have to say to that is, why? What was the motivation? Did they just want to hold on to their racism? Doctoral programs are competitive, but come on! Again, I know that racism pervades the experience of black academics (I work in that setting) but graduate students actively going after fellow researchers out of sheer overt racism and then being able to convince faculty to join in? I have not seen that. So I was thinking perhaps Wallace was not great at the work they all valued so very highly and which was central to their lives, that he had a crummy and sometimes mean demeanor, but mostly was just like gray paint. I couldn't believe anyone ever invited him anywhere.

      That leads to the next issue which is that Taylor can't write dialogue. He just can't. No one has ever had a conversation that sounds like any conversation here. Relatedly, I am not sure Taylor has friends, but friends do not behave like these freinds do. It was really inauthentic.

      The third major problem was Miller. I am going to stay away from the discussion of violence here, and its not because domestic violence is not deadly serious. I was pleased to see a look at intimate partner violence in the context of relationships between gay men. Its common and underreported and needs to see the light. But my primary issue with Miller for purposes of this review is simply... why? Why this weekend, after knowing each other and being in the same social and professional whirl for a long time, did Miller suddenly decide/realize/accept that he was bisexual, and more importantly, why was he suddenly passionately attracted to Wallace? It was baffling. There was no setup. I understood what drew and repelled Wallace in the relationship - self-loathing and loneliness are solid foundations for horrible relationships the world over, and given its opening weekend this relationship was going to epically horrible. What though would have drawn Miller to Wallace? Its a mystery and one Taylor never addresses.

      So I really enjoyed the words here, but the story was not there and the main character, in this character driven novel had a compelling past, but was not at all compelling in the present. And also, the relentlessness of the bleakness here was a huge issue. There were more moments of ease in Sophie's Choice, The Naked and the Dead, and The Handmaid's Tale. Blood Meridian was, comparatively, a comic novel. You get my drift. 5 for prose craftsmanship, 1 for story, tone and character development.
    • 4/5
      This book covers a weekend right before the school year starts for a doctoral student. He exists on the margins in so many ways, but a chance encounter with a seemingly straight colleague throws everything into question. This book is heavy but incisive on it's coverage of institutional racism, white fragility, and sexual violence. Brandon Taylor's writing on desire is just stunning. The end petered out a bit, but that's a minor complaint. 4.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      Beautifully written but full of so much pain. The book takes place over only a few days but encompasses lifetimes---how the characters, particularly Wallace, came to this point...and of course, where is he going...where are all of these graduate students going. Taylor writes with a tremendous amount of emotional and physical detail---not only the sex but the individual feelings of sweat, fear. desperation and on and on. A sequel 10 years in the future for these characters?
    • 3/5
      There's been a swell of popularity in novels about toxic relationships in recent years. I don't think I'm the right audience because all the ones that receive the most praise completely fail to hook me. (Fates and Furies, yes I'm talking mostly about you!)

      This one at least brings in race and sexuality which is why I didn't give it a terrible rating, but for the most part, this is still the story of toxic people hooking up and having elite parties, feigning a belief that the world doesn't revolve around them, while all their actions scream, "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!!!"

      An oversimplistic take? Perhaps. I still don't like it.
    • 3/5
      3 trending up on account of some beautiful prose and some interesting consideration about young adulthood (20-somethings) and what constitutes "real life." In other words, when/how do you know you are an adult? Earning a paycheck? Responsibility for others? Acceptance of yourself? Contributing to society? all questions that are asked to some degree, but not fully answered. Wallace and most of his friends are grad students in science at an unnamed Midwestern university (WI, Madison is my guess). They have important research and experiments that create a rigorous schedule, but it is late summer, so they have a little time to let loose - most of the action occurs in just a weekend where Wallace is on the verge of crisis for many reasons: he has always felt "other than" even among his friends - he is black, gay and from the South. He is also hiding a history of abuse that is just coming to his full consciousness after the recent death of his father; he did not go home for the funeral. All these things create little barriers (or Wallace has allowed them to) - he keeps his emotions and opinions tightly held and as such often comes off to others as snobby, boring, self-satisfied and unapproachable. However, on this particular weekend, he allows himself some vulnerability and it's a little unclear by the end whether it was successful or not. He gets sexually involved with another student, Miller whom he probably trusts least of all his friend group. He also tells a good female friend about his father's death and she shares that info with all. He has a dust-up in the lab with another problem student who accuses him of misogyny and this gets to his advisor who essentially puts him on probation. In lots of ways, he has framed himself as a victim, and doesn't know how to be otherwise. But latent racism and homophobia play a role too. It's a lot to tackle in a weekend. Wallace just doesn't know what he wants and part of the issue is that he has never been taught to want or to believe he has any agency. "He wants to be not himself. He wants to be not depressed. He wants to be not anxious. He wants to be well. He wants to be good." (271) Overall I was sympathetic to Wallace, but it definitely wasn't an uplifting read, which is why I didn't rate it higher.
      Some examples of the powerful writing here: "It is why he doesn't trust memory. Memory sifts. Memory lifts. Memory makes due with what it is given. Memory is not about facts. Memory is an inconsistent measurement of the pain in one's life." (144)
      "But the deficiency [a classmate] is alluding is not...one of the many way in which people come into graduate school unprepared for its demands, wrong-footed this way and that by its odd rituals and rigors. What [he] is referring to is instead a deficiency of whiteness, a lack of some requisite sameness. This deficiency cannot be overcome. The fact is no matter how hard he tries or how much he learns or how many skills he masters, he will always be provisional in the eyes of these people, no matter how they might be fond of him or gentle with him." (162)
      "Kindness is a debt, Wallace think. Kindness is something owed and something repaid. Kindness is an obligation." (171)
      "Eventually they are all just people going about their lives, shopping and eating, laughing and arguing, doing what people in the world do. This too is real life, he [Wallace] thinks. Not merely the accumulation of tasks, things to be done and sorted, but also the bumping up against other lives, everyone in the world insignificant when taken and observed together." (246)
      "The truly awful thing about beauty is that it reminds us of our limits. Beauty is a kind of unrelenting cruelty. It takes the truth, hones it to a terrifying keenness, and uses it to slice us to the bone." (271)
    • 4/5
      Emma puts her head on Wallace's shoulder, but she won't say anything either, can't bring herself to. No one does. No one ever does. Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened. Only Wallace will remember it.

      When Wallace begins his graduate studies in chemistry at a university in the midwest, it feels like a chance to begin again, without baggage. But a few years in and Wallace is still himself and he's still a Black man in an almost entirely white environment. This novel recounts a few days in Wallace's life, as he negotiates his way through a difficult and hostile lab environment, his friend group where he feels like an outsider, always, and his own loneliness, based both on his father's recent death and his lack of romantic attachments. Into that comes Miller, another chemistry post-graduate, with whom he has always felt a certain hostility.

      This was a difficult novel to read, not because of the writing, which is very, very good, but because the novel is so centered on Wallace and Wallace is seriously depressed. Wallace has lost any resiliency he might once have had and the casual micro-aggressions (and overt hostilities) leave him drained and deeply unhappy. He's damped down his own anger so deeply that he comes across to his friends and co-workers as affectless and unemotional, but that careful veneer is one that is eating away at him and this moment, when the end of the summer weather is beautiful and he can almost see the finishing lines of his PhD, is when he can no longer sustain the effort, even when there's the possibility of love.
    • 4/5
      I really liked it. Highly impressive for a debut. The existential ennui of being an overeducated twentysomething plus the grueling realities of graduate school were rendered painfully accurately. I thought that Taylor's portrayal of racism in academia was well done and illuminating. It colors so much of Wallace's experience yet for many of the white people around him there's this plausible deniability as though he isn't a reliable narrator. There's a passage that really struck me about how when you identify something as racist, white people "hold it up to the light" to verify it as though you cannot be trusted and they have to verify it themselves. The metaphor is powerful.

      This isn't the easiest read -- it also grapples with topics like the long term ramifications of childhood sexual abuse. I liked the contemplation of how childhood relationships and abandonment by parents impact decision paralysis as a young adult.

      Anyway, a great read that I might not have discovered other than the Booker list. Check it out.
    • 2/5
      This is a novel about a young black man from an impoverished family, doing his graduate studies in a Midwestern town. The environment is cut-throat and claustrophobic. To top it all up, the protagonist recently lost his dad. He is also gay. The novel is an exploration of his inner landscape and the way he just can't seem to find his place, both because the environment excludes him and because he keeps everyone at a distance.

      The prose is beautiful and it is clear that the author is highly sensitive. I applaud it for its importance to people who can identify with it more than I could.

      However, I found it very repetitive, all the dialogues sounded the same. The protagonist was just so deeply detached from the world around him that whenever he communicated with others it just felt too combative. Nobody was likeable in this novel. Even if such a choice for the characters came as a literary device to represent how hostile his surrounding seems, it just feels forced. I could accept all that, but when dialogue fails so badly as it does - I can't call this good literature.

      I do base my ratings mostly on emotional connection, so I can't give this more than 2.