Focus on Racism

Real life is a deeply affecting tale about the emotional cost of reckoning with the desire and overcoming pain including nuanced, precise account of micro-aggressions, abuse, racism, homophobia, trauma, grief and alienation. Taylor wielding a scalpel-like prose, explaining human behaviours along with Wallace’s petri-dish worms under the microscope.

There is a precision in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes wondering around the pages.

Real Life is long listed for the 2020 Booker Prize. Wallace who is four years into biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern University, has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worm. His father died a few week ago in Alabama, with Wallace not attending the funeral a fact he hid from his friends Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. He kept a wary distance from those closest to him for self-preservation.

Taylor’s protagonist Wallace puts it “When you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discuss if you are telling the truth.”

Real life traces series of humiliations and emotional reckonings that signal Wallace’s unravelling.

Wallace, a black, gay who entered graduate school to study bio-sciences, his class being “the first in more than three decades to include a black person”.

Wallace is forced to grapple with both the trauma of the past and the question of the future after a week of blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations.

Wallace’s white friends do nothing but stand by  each time he is belittled. “There will always be good white people who love him and want he best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down”.

Hi nemeses include a fellow gay man sneering at Wallace’s deficiencies and a female colleague fabricating a misogyny complaint. Despite all this he sticks around as detailed in a visceral, dreamlike flashback, is that he’s running away from homophobia and sexual abuse. Abuse that his parents blamed on him: “My mother  slapped me and called me faggot  called me sissy. Said everything except I’m sorry  that happened to you.”

Wallace’s Real Life bring voice to the Black Lives Matter debate.

Real Life by Brendon Taylor, Daunt Books £9.99, 326 pages.