In terms of craft, the passage in which Wallace reveals the horrors of his past is a disturbing, virtuosic piece of writing. Taylor sensitively records his protagonist’s attempts to excavate these deeply buried personal tragedies. Wallace’s principal struggle throughout the novel is with the legacy of sexual violence. Photograph: 2020 Booker Prize/Bill Adams/PA Wallace told no one about this, nor did he attend his father’s funeral.īrandon Taylor. Early on in the narrative, Wallace’s friends discover that his father passed away a few weeks ago. Set over a late summer weekend, the novel is a snapshot of Wallace’s life in the aftermath of his father’s recent death. With its icily cool sentences, mysterious tonal shifts and determinedly open ending, Taylor’s novel is also a curiously liquid thing, with troubling, opaque depths. Wallace soon reflects that “there was something slick in the water, something apart from the water itself, like a loose second skin swilling under the surface”. In this formally and conceptually testing book, however, such moments of repose are never without threat. On the Friday evening on which Real Life begins, Wallace abandons his carousing colleagues and the bars of their midwestern university for the tranquility of a local lake. W allace, the queer black biochemistry postgraduate at the centre of US author Brandon Taylor’s Booker-longlisted debut, often seeks out solitude.
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