Wallace astutely diagnoses the ways his privileged white peers “have a vested interest in underestimating racism” the depictions of the micro and macroaggressions he faces as he moves through a predominantly white world are figured with piercing accuracy. Taylor’s treatment of racial politics in the novel is sophisticated and forceful too. The quasi-gothic stretch of prose powerfully speaks both of the darkness of what Wallace endured as a child and his difficulty in giving it linguistic shape as an adult. They told of the Bible and how the flood came upon the land and drowned all the wicked, and how be next The house stank of sweat and piss and the bathroom always smelled of shit because kept the used toilet paper in a little can … And in that house, fetid and stinking and sweating, learned all about the ways that a person can do God great ill.” This pivotal recollection is a relentless battery of troubling motifs: broken bodies, rotting vegetation, decaying birds. He remembers how, when terrifying tempests shredded Alabama skies, his dysfunctional family told him “stories or sang spirituals. In terms of craft, the passage in which Wallace reveals the horrors of his past is a disturbing, virtuosic piece of writing. Taylor sensitively records his protagonist’s attempts to excavate these deeply buried personal tragedies.

Wallace’s principal struggle throughout the novel is with the legacy of sexual violence. Photograph: 2020 Booker Prize/Bill Adams/PA

Wallace told no one about this, nor did he attend his father’s funeral.īrandon Taylor. Early on in the narrative, Wallace’s friends discover that his father passed away a few weeks ago. Set over a late summer weekend, the novel is a snapshot of Wallace’s life in the aftermath of his father’s recent death. With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is also a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths. Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat. On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake.

W allace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude.

Real life brandon taylor