6/6/2023 0 Comments Brandon taylor book review![]() ![]() ![]() He has discovered some mould that has contaminated his experiment and suspects a colleague of being responsible. Wallace leaves the biochemistry lab on a Friday evening in despair. The story takes place over a single weekend in late summer. The concerns of real life – the need for employment and someone to live with, for protection against immediate insecurity – overrule the Christian belief that the next life matters more than this one. God, the allegorical teachings of the Old Testament and the songs his grandparents sang ‘that their grandparents sang that their grandparents sang that their grandparents sang’ have given way to the cold facts and peer-reviewed processes of the lab in which he conducts his research. Wallace has escaped the homely prison of the South for false freedom elsewhere. And, in a way that any black and queer person suddenly elevated to a utopian white space will recognise, his sense of multiple displacement forces him inside himself. When he moved to an unnamed university town in the Midwest to study for a doctorate in biochemistry, he told himself that he had to be ‘a Midwesterner at heart’ because ‘being in the South and being gay were incompatible … no two parts of a person could be more incompatible.’ But now Wallace is the only black person in his cohort, surrounded by preternaturally healthy and athletic white peers. ![]() W allace, the protagonist of Brandon Taylor’s first novel, Real Life, is black, gay, overweight and from Alabama. ![]()
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