This review would be a lot easier to write if Brandon Taylor weren’t so damn good. It seemed almost to beckon me like a half-curled hand, and when I finished reading it, I sat in the state of suspension that often comes over me at the end of a particularly good book, the sense of coming slowly back to awareness of the world outside my mind, and finding it echoing with a harrowing quiet that wasn’ ✧ find this review & others on my blog ✧ “ Real Life” was like a crush, an obsession, a compulsion. ✧ find this review & others on my blog ✧ This review would be a lot easier to write if Brandon Taylor weren’t so damn good. Truly, this is stunning work from a writer who wields his craft in absolutely unforgettable ways.
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The way Taylor writes about bodies in the physical world is one of the highlights in a novel full of highlights. And there is a sharp undercurrent of the erotic throughout. He is closed unto himself but wanting to open to others even though the people around him may not be fully up to the task. Wallace, the man at the center of this novel, is written with such nuance and tenderness and complexity. He writes so powerfully about so many things-the perils of graduate education, blackness in a predominantly white setting, loneliness, desire, trauma, need. The intimate prose of Brandon Taylor’s exquisite debut novel Real Life offers exactly that kind of writing. He is closed unto himself but wanting to open There is writing so exceptional, so intricately crafted that it demands reverence.
There is writing so exceptional, so intricately crafted that it demands reverence.
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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.more An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood.įor 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. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of fri 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. Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree.