Raised in poverty by parents who allowed an adult friend to abuse him, Wallace left home in search of reprieve.

The memories emerge drip by drip, as if from the tip of a pipette. Wallace seems to like these people-perhaps most of all Miller, a surly, mercurial scientist, and the quietest in their group-but none of them manages to comprehend the “curious shape of his grief, which does not bear the typical dimensions.” Wallace holds his friends at a remove, leaving unexplained the childhood trauma that has predisposed him to introversion and distanced him from his family in the first place. “It was your dad,” another friend reminds Wallace, as though he does not remember. His decision to skip the funeral scandalizes his breezy white friends-one of whom, a histrionic Swede, spent the summer before graduate school summiting a mountain to mourn the death of his grandfather. Taylor relegates the first to a numb aside: Wallace’s father has just died. The loss of his nematodes is the second death that is introduced in the opening pages. When the book opens, Wallace is pondering whether he ought to leave his university and the predominantly white, Midwestern town that houses it. Taylor’s début shadows Wallace, a gay black student from a small town in Alabama, through a series of personal and professional skirmishes that complicate the last weekend before his fourth year of graduate school. “This is to make you better.”Ĭondescension of this kind recurs throughout “Real Life,” a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines.

“This isn’t to punish you,” Wallace was told. The last time he denied an accusation of carelessness, she sided with a colleague, forcing Wallace to sort and then re-sort a set of reagents that someone else had mixed up. Alone in the bay of a laboratory, he oversees the creatures’ feverish reproductive cycles under a microscope, “herding desired chromosomes and wicking away the undesired ones,” in search of the “sought-after strain.” Magnified, the contamination on his plates resembles “one of those horrible re-creations of a volcanic event-whole civilizations frozen in ash and soot and coarse white stone.” It also seems “entirely unaccidental.” Wallace suspects sabotage but is too shrewd to try to prove it to his supervisor, a harried white woman who conveys constant doubt about his competence. Wallace, who breeds nematodes, has spent the summer trying to induce a specific genetic mutation. Photograph by Vivian Le / NYT / ReduxĮarly in “ Real Life,” Brandon Taylor’s brooding début novel, a biochemistry student named Wallace removes his agar plates from a shared incubator to find that mold has tainted several days’ worth of work. Brandon Taylor’s début, “Real Life,” shadows Wallace, a gay black student from a small Southern town.

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