Real Life by Brandon Taylor- 3.5 rounded up-(POLL)

[Booknblues]

One would expect a book listed on several highly anticipated releases for 2020 and which is about the intersection of academia, an African American gay biochem graduate student to be a bit more riveting, but I can't promise that. It is a nuanced look at Wallace's life with his "white" friends over one weekend at a Midwestern University.

According to Wallace everything is fine. But everything is not fine. Wallace's father died several weeks ago and he is just now informing his friends. "Dead, for weeks now. Wallace forgot it. He managed not forgiveness, but erasure. They seem so much the same to him." Wallace is a bit of a jerk and so are all of his friends.

And yet with not much happening, a lot is happening and there are many undercurrents which leaves the reader unsettled:

The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgment. It’s unfair because white people have a vested interest in underestimating racism, its amount, its intensity, its shape, its effects. They are the fox in the henhouse.

It is a hard book to love or even like, but it is thought provoking. For those considering this I will warn that the sex scenes are raw and explicit with some having a bit of violence.

For those who love character studies this book surely has that.