Real Life by Brandon Taylor

I read this as part of my annual quest to read all of the Booker Prize long list in the time between when it comes out and when the next is announced. Some years I am lucky enough to have read one or two already, but the one constant is that I am almost never successful in this goal. This book was short listed. The author of this book, his first, spent time in Madison and Iowa City as part of his path to becoming an author. That is relevant because the book is set in an unnamed university town in the American Midwest, where Wallace – a gay Black man from Alabama – is a graduate student in biochemistry. This isn’t strictly a "campus novel" but the academic environment which surrounds Wallace is absolutely central to the story and where it is going. Department politics, the grudges, rivalries and friendships between him and his peers, Wallace’s fraught relationship with his own supervisor are all part of what pulls him downwards. The book chronicles a single weekend, from Friday evening through to early Monday morning. It is almost like reading in real lime. Wallace gets embroiled in a series of confrontations: some professional, others personal, each fraught with tension, miscommunication and the high-pitched hum of barely repressed violence. At moments, Wallace’s apparent apathy is exasperating – his refusal, for example, to level indictments of his own at a classmate who accuses him of misogyny. Every now and then, however, he lashes out, inflicting pain, sometimes seemingly at random, to assuage his own suffering . He is human, suffering what even the most privledged of us suffer, but then piled on that is being black, being poor and all that entails, being gay, and being completely out of his element. It is exhausting, and the reader feels that. Well done.