A FINALIST FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE “A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric ...

Our discussion of Real Life started with a shared observation that this was a classic Iowa Writers workshopped novel, complete with beautiful metaphors, an eye for minor details, and an over-workshopped structure that basically lacks any plot movement and focuses instead on a labored interiority. This pretty much summed up our take on Real Life. Taylor can certainly write. There are great passages and really powerful metaphors and observations. He finds an interesting character in Wallace, a Black gay graduate student torn about his commitment to his program, alienated from his classmates, and slowly coming to realize how much the trauma of his childhood and the recent death of his father is affecting him. The revelation of the father's death is paced very carefully and skillfully in the novel, and that plot arc is the strongest structural choice in the book. In glimpses, the characters and situations of the book are very strong and very true -- scenes of the characters chatting at a beach or hanging out after a party all feel very real and profound. The problem with the novel that that's the only place it works -- in glimpses. So many of the characters of the book don't make sense when you take their actions as a whole. The villains of the story -- the grad students who openly express racism -- are so comically bluntly offensive in their actions that you can't believe that anyone would actually do those things. The primary love interest, Miller, doesn't add up when you consider that he says he's never had a gay relationship but then is so powerfully aggressive in his sexual advances on Wallace. The plot has similar issues. Why does Walllace never get an actual glimpse of the world outside of grad school if the whole book is a meditation on how he has to decide if he's leaving or staying? If Wallace's relationship with his father is so critical, why does his father make such weird, inconsistent choices about Wallace's sexuality and his trauma experience? And if Miller is as abusive as he seems, and Wallace is as unreliable as he appears to be, why doesn't Taylor give us more clues and more scenes for perspective on what's real in Wallace's world? Over and over again, actions just seem to happen and characters just seem to say things only for the author to make a local point with no greater sense of a consistent universe. At the same time, we found the observations about the so-called real world outside of grad school facile and lazy -- things that we couldn't take seriously but also had no proof that we were supposed to question when Wallace said them. Perhaps worst of all, the book is just deeply depressing. There's no character growth or real action -- Wallace never resolves what he should do about school or Miller. He just goes through the novel being misanthropic and destructive, running from relationships and feeling trapped. Some at NUBClub argued that was the point of the novel -- that real life is suffering through circumstances you can't control and have no choice in -- but many of us felt that was not a pleasant story to read and that without some arc, it was pointless to have written. So we left Real Life with mixed feelings. It's certainly a well written work and there are great moments within it, but as a whole, it was just unsatisfying and needlessly punishing.