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From the Bookshelf of What's the Name of That Book???…

Real Life

Brandon Taylor

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Mar 16, 2020 Misha rated it really liked it

Shelves: rape, alcoholism, doorway-people, read-2020, doorway-prose, academia, lgbtqia, poc-author, black-american, debut

This is a brutally frank campus novel in the vein of Sally Rooney's Normal People. Similarly, it is centered on characters who feel unmoored in some way in the world, haunted by the past, and haunted by the abuse they suffered in their youth from their families and others.

Wallace is a biochem student, a black queer man who floats uneasily among his group of white friends. He suffers silently as the slings and arrows of racism and fat-shaming come his way from others, until he can be silent no lo This is a brutally frank campus novel in the vein of Sally Rooney's Normal People. Similarly, it is centered on characters who feel unmoored in some way in the world, haunted by the past, and haunted by the abuse they suffered in their youth from their families and others.

Wallace is a biochem student, a black queer man who floats uneasily among his group of white friends. He suffers silently as the slings and arrows of racism and fat-shaming come his way from others, until he can be silent no longer. His relationship with fellow student, a self-identified straight boy, is fraught, and a meditation on desire, violence, and reality.

Some lovely lines, although I will admit this is not the book I quite wanted to be reading at the beginning of a #coronavirus quarantine as it is at times quite bleak with shades of Yanagihara's A Little Life.

"It always seemed to him that when people were sad for you, they were sad for themselves, as if your misfortune were just an excuse for them to feel what it was they wanted to feel. Sympathy was a kind of ventriloquism." (32)

"People can be unpredictable in their cruelty." (78)

"What Roman 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 of 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." (161-2)

"Wallace pauses, still in Miller's arms. There will always be this moment. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. ...No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It's the place in every white person's heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes." (188)

"This is perhaps why people get together in the first place. The sharing of time. The sharing of the responsibility of anchoring oneself in the world. Life is less terrible when you can just rest for a moment, put everything down and wait without having to worry about being washed away. People take each other's hands and they hold on tight as they can, they hold on to each other and to themselves, and when they let go, they can because they know that the other person will not." (312) ...more

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Sep 28, 2020 Ray rated it really liked it

I liked this book as both a novel I enjoyed reading AND a significant contribution to the queer canon.

In terms of the canon, as the main character Wallace says in various contexts throughout the book, if a white person had written this, it would automatically be vaulted right up there with Holleran, et al. and the Violet Quill Gang.

That's not to say it's a perfect novel--which is also the case with Dancer from the Dance. However, white gay authors who contribute something new (think Scott Heim a ...more

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