Real Life
Ratings37
Average rating4
A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice.
Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community.
Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.
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Not for me. Powerful but hard to read something saturated with pain and violence. Final chapter successfully broke my heart.
Real Life is a campus coming-of-age story that follows Wallace, a black, queer biochemistry PhD student originally from the South, and a brief cross-section of his life as a grad student at a nondescript Midwestern university. His life is one of real and imposed isolation in what feels like purgatory between the trauma of his childhood and the unknowable expanses of the life that follows grad school.
The way the author portrays the micro aggressions Wallace faces over such a short period of time is as heartbreaking as it is frustrating, infuriating even. As someone who rarely, if ever, experiences that, it's a painful window into an accumulation of hurts. The perfunctory nature of Wallace's day, a head-down feeling, is stippled with big metaphysical dreads, and a beautifully-written but absolutely horrific unveiling of survived trauma.
I thought the book was wonderfully written and an exercise in empathy for what it's like to have a marginalized identity in academia.
