We Meet Again Jeremy Brandon Rogers
Fiction
Jeremy O. Harris: Brandon Taylor 'Subjugates Usa With the Deft Hand of a Dom'
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REAL LIFE
Past Brandon Taylor
Wallace's male parent died several weeks ago, but more pressingly so did the drove of nematodes he has been diligently studying all summer in an unnamed university in an unnamed Midwestern town. Like I was quite recently, and like the novelist Brandon Taylor was one time himself, Wallace is a black gay grad student from the South who is mining hope for some better or different life in the haunted halls of a white academic infinite. A space that demands his total attention, lest he affirm the sense that he was never meant to be at that place to brainstorm with. In Taylor's stunning debut, "Real Life," quiet diligence toward ane's goals mutates into a spiral that leaves the heed and body bruised as if survivors of a psychic war zone.
We meet Wallace on a Friday nighttime in his college boondocks, as he's trudging, begrudgingly, toward an evening hang with friends past the lake. It's neither the expiry of his father nor that of his nematodes that inspires the drag of his feet, but the overwhelming dread that accompanies socializing with his young man biochemists, a complicated composite of friends and foes. Sharp spikes of worry and repression are the heartbeat of this narrative that follows Wallace down the rabbit pigsty of one of the last weekends of their summer vacation in this quiet town. And so goes "Real Life," a novel that probes — painstakingly, with the same microscopic precision its protagonist uses in the lab — the ways that an anxious queer black brain is mutated by the legacies of growing up in a society (in Wallace'due south example, rural Alabama) where the body that houses it is not welcome.
It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane. As in the modernist novels of Woolf and Tolstoy cited in passing throughout, the true activeness of Taylor'southward novel exists beneath the surface, cached in subterranean spaces. The rhythms and rituals of Ph.D. test prep, vegan dinners and idle academic gossip become the landscape upon which the existent piece of work of "Existent Life" is built. Taylor proves himself to exist a keen observer of the psychology of not simply trauma, only its repercussions: how private suffering can ricochet from one person to injure those defenseless in his path. The aftershocks of these childhood horrors ("He almost jumps at the fright of it, the wholeness of the retention. His body remembers. His traitorous torso") set Wallace upwards for further humiliation within new American contexts that are still not designed for our protagonist. For example, the jarring moment after a female colleague accuses him of misogyny in terms laced with racism and homophobia, equally abrupt as a stiletto: "The virtually unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you lot tell white people that something is racist, they concur information technology upward to the calorie-free and try to discern if you are telling the truth." He abandons the confrontation before it tin escalate further, the hallway'southward movement sensors failing to discover his presence. His body nothing more an apparition, ephemeral in this space.
[ Read an excerpt from "Real Life." ]
Over the course of a unmarried weekend, beginning that Friday dark and ending on the Monday morning of orientation, "Existent Life" moves us through the stark internal realities of being young, gifted and black in a town where your peers are abundantly yt, whyte and WHITE. I was struck by the whiteness of Wallace'south surroundings, a fact of many spaces of American higher learning, and one rarely articulated in literature by writers of any race. Even so Taylor allows whiteness to motility consistently on the periphery of Wallace'southward gaze, in tandem with the muted hum of desire: its volume rising and falling as his field of vision encounters white hands adjusting tight shorts revealing flashes of untanned, untouched flesh. Our curiously quiet and cautious protagonist holds a well of desire that could fill the many baths he takes and then some with the mucilaginous liquid of his desire: a desire to escape his past, a want to discover refuge in some time to come, a want for a man. A desire that he has constantly sublimated and denied in favor of silent yearning, until that Friday nighttime. Spirals e'er begin and end with longing, and this is true throughout "Real Life."
The novel'due south at times stunted and awkward dialogue ("Trying. What proficient is trying?" "Y'all have to endeavour. Yous always have to attempt." "What if we're there, just I don't know nosotros're there?" "You'd know. Y'all just would") can clash with its oftentimes tight, blissful prose. Even so much like the tropes of queer literary lust that populate the final one-half of the novel (the Sulking Straight Meridian Who Sodomizes Without Fear of Carrion), fifty-fifty this halting dialogue never feels wholly out of step with Wallace's psyche, which itself functions in discordant, sometimes off-putting, thrillingly contradictory ways. Add to all this Taylor's securely rooted understandings of the rarefied worlds of both provincial grad school life and biochemistry in item, which should inspire envy in every writer striving for specificity. There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the anxiety of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry.
An accumulation of aggressions — micro, macro, mental, physical — are piled atop both Wallace and the reader as we move through the novel, as Taylor subjugates us with the deft manus of a dom to the airless vertigo that rests at the heart of the spiral. Wallace'southward memories enter the prose like whispered secrets, drowned out like the violence of his childhood home that, "when the fan in his room was going, he couldn't hear." Because for Wallace that'southward what memories are: secrets. The uncomplicated truth of "Real Life" is that Wallace, like myself and many others who've wandered nighttime, white halls in search of a hereafter, has made himself invisible by shedding the skin of his past, and adopting a new skin unadorned with the blemishes of history. But the but style to again be visible, to the world or even to himself, is to adopt new bruises in place of the onetime, for to get where he is going, he must recall where he'southward been.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/18/books/review/brandon-taylor-real-life.html
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