Taylor’s choice to incubate Wallace’s coming-of-age story within the genre goes one step further. And, having set the stage, Taylor takes a step back, all elements in place, and watches as his experiment unfurls.Ĭritics have hailed Taylor’s debut as a devastating rewrite of the campus novel, a genre marked by the enclosed physical space of a university campus, and that often deals with the intellectual pretensions of academia. Here we are at the crossroads of whether Wallace should stay or go. Wallace has very nearly had enough: he’s pushed to the point where dropping out is a serious possibility. Tragedy has struck: In the lab (his nematode breeding experiments have been deliberately contaminated) in the family (his father has passed, Wallace did not attend the funeral, he would prefer that you don’t ask) and in his social life (his friends do ask, persistently and infuriatingly, under the guise of good intentions). From four years of Wallace’s postgraduate study, he extracts a single weekend, isolates it, and slides it under the microscope. Taylor approaches Real Life with similar precision.
We follow Wallace, a gay, black biochemistry postgraduate student, who reacts to suffering by continually minimising himself, as if attempting to shrink himself into the microscopic company of the nematodes he works with in his lab, which day in and day out he observes, cultivates, and then, beheads. ” Job 7:3.īrandon Taylor’s stunning debut opens with an epigraph from the explicitly theodical book of Job, the oldest historical text to seriously question: why do good men suffer? In Real Life, that question is transposed onto a university campus in Alabama. “I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me.
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