These heavy, uncomfortable topics make for a heavy, uncomfortable reading experience, one that shares more than a few similarities with Hanya Yanagihara’s juggernaut, A Little Life, both in terms of subject matter and tone. As Wallace’s carefully constructed barriers begin to crumble, he spirals into hyper-intellectual ruminations on topics such as grief, privilege, racism, trauma, queer sexuality, violence, academia and the messy ways in which they all mix. While navigating his simmering feelings of alienation and his inability to reconcile past wounds, Wallace reaches a boiling point amid conflicts and confrontations with colleagues and friends, as well as an unsettling sexual relationship with a former frenemy. Impressive in its economy, the novel spans the course of a single weekend in the life of Wallace, a black graduate student who has moved from Alabama to a Midwestern university town. Dispensing with Midwestern niceties and Southern platitudes, Brandon Taylor announces his arrival to readers with Real Life, a devastating wallop of a debut novel.
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