![]() I felt my palms growing clammy and my throat tighten during the innocuous tennis matches and uneventful lab sessions that constitute the novel’s plot and, during one particularly agonisingly narrated dinner party, I had to stop reading and stare slack-jawed at the wall.Ī tight, breathless campus novel that takes place over a single summer weekend in an unnamed, Midwestern college town, Real Life superbly depicts the drifting loneliness and bewildering isolation of life within academia’s cloistered corridors. There is a flickering, exhausted satire in the novel’s depiction of the reality of being the only black person in an overwhelmingly white space, and many of the novel’s sequences, even the most quotidian, are both icy and sweating with tension. Conveying all the discomfort of a faded bruise, Taylor writes with a clarity that renders everything slightly off-centre. ![]() Real Life, Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, is ridiculously good the kind of good that makes you want to tell everybody else to shut their laptops and go home because they’ll never be able to write prose this outstanding. ![]() ![]() ![]() ALEX HEWITT considers the relationship between masculinity, blackness, and queer identity in Brandon Taylor’s Real Life, which is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker prize. ![]()
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