Stuck in a Petri dish

Eleanor Halls admires a brilliant novel about race, sexuality – and biochemistry

HREAL LIFE by Brandon Taylor 336pp, Publisher, £9.99, ebook £8

ow many of us have laughed to dispel discomfort? With a rictus grin and eyes downcast, an offensive remark is buried to keep the peace. Nobody likes to cause a scene.

In Brandon Taylor’s superb, 2020 Booker-longlisted debut novel, Real Life, which trails a group of bored and frustrated postgraduate biochemists over one summer weekend in the American Midwest, laughter covers the pages like heat rash. “A pantomime of intimacy, a cult of happiness, a cult of friendship,” says Wallace, the group’s narrator, of his friends. Readers will shudder remembering their last dinner party.

Wallace is black, and the odd one out among his white peers whose lives glide together, in sync, towards hopes and dreams they’ve never had to question, while his own stalls with doubt. He should be grateful to be here, his friends tell him one night, despite the fact that his lab-mate is racist and homophobic and his supervisor is discriminatory. One friend highlights the “deficiencies” of Wallace’s background, while the others chortle in shock, before quickly changing topic. “Silence is their way of getting by, because if they are silent long enough, then this moment of minor discomfort will pass for them, will fold down into the landscape of the evening as if it never happened,” Wallace observes, before eating himself sick with anxiety. Even his lover, Miller, is complicit. “There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down,” Wallace notes, his loneliness so exposed you could touch it.

His friends aside, Wallace is sinking into a depression that has been growing inside him ever since he was raped by an older man as a young boy. The guilt and shame he feels has mutated into a desire to be abused again, for violence to numb the original pain. He learns to provoke anger from other men, because “if God wanted nothing to do with me, then I’d take the devil. I’d taken him on my knees where I’d taken the men, let him pull me down in a bed of kudzu and f--- me, so long as I wasn’t empty anymore.” Wallace’s sexual relationship with Miller, who suffers from an uncontrollable rage as a result of his own emotional wounds, becomes twisted and dangerous: “the two of them passing cruelty back and forth like a joint,” says Wallace.

The way Taylor can shift their relationship between the bestial and tender with just an adjective is both alarming and brilliant.

The novel appears painfully rooted in Taylor’s own experience. Both he and Wallace are from the Deep South, both are gay and both are black. Taylor, who wrote the novel in less than five weeks, is also a biochemistry graduate (the only black student across his four-year programme), and the sadness Wallace feels for his passion – science – that will not love him back, is Taylor’s own. He left the profession in 2016, as he wrote in an essay for Buzzfeed, because “science was being told that I had to work harder despite working my hardest […] science was being told that racism was not racism.”

Wallace, like Taylor, studies nematode worms, and the novel devotes pages to the minutiae of Wallace’s experiments, worms “winking glyphs”, with “briars of spores”, their germlines “fisted and gnarled”. As you might expect from a scientist, Taylor is a masterful observer, his details of everything from a tennis match to sex and dissections both clinically and exquisitely precise. “Roman studies the early development of the heart in mice, the point at which the clump of white tissue no more animal-like than the white meat of an egg begins to jerk and to beat,” Taylor writes. “He holds the hearts of tiny animals on his fingernail.”

What is striking about Real Life is that this is not a coming-of-age novel, as works about sexuality so often are. Taking place over just a single weekend, the characters do not change; they cannot grow. They are infuriatingly rooted to the same spot, their words, wants, mistakes and flaws circling around and around as if stuck in a fetid Petri dish. There is no happy ending, because this is real life, and it is uncomfortable.

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MASTERFUL Brandon Taylor