The reader both soars above it all and gets hit in the face with the violence of a hollow bone snap. The interplay between the removed perspective of a bird in flight and the corporeal, vital connection of the flock creates a kind of dance where the prose is like bird tracks in snow. To have the world beneath you, that inversion of scale, what is small becoming large, what is large becoming small, the way a bird can move where it wants in space, no dimension unconquerable.” Taylor writes, “How strange to be a bird, Wallace thinks. At the same time, individual birds are not only delicate and hollow-boned but powerful and able to gain perspective–from high above–that humans can’t. Applied to human behavior, the parallels are clear: the flock of whiteness, the flock of queerness, and the policing of identities and experiences that happens within and between these flocks are central to Wallace’s experience of life by this particular unnamed lake. An individual bird flies into a window and dies, gets eaten by ants a flock of birds conforms, takes up space, moves together. But Wallace’s rich inner life envelops the reader into a much broader story.īirds and their behavior are a major source of imagery and metaphor in Real Life. Taking place over the course of one weekend, the plot mainly revolves around an encounter Wallace has with an ostensibly straight man in his friend group named Miller. Overhead, gulls drifted easy as anything.įrom there, the novel spools out into a sprawling but meticulous meditation on grief, reality and unreality, violence, and the corporeal and cerebral experience of a queer Black Southern man in a sea of ubiquitous Midwestern whiteness. The air was heavy with their good times as the white people scattered across the tiered patios, pried their mouths apart, and beamed their laughter at each other’s faces.
People coveted these last blustery days of summer before the weather turned cold and mercurial. But the prose is so subtly acquisitive and lucid that it immediately requires its reader’s eyes and heart:
And Wallace’s father is dead.Ī lot of setup in the first paragraph is something some writing teachers might eschew. Wallace has a detached tone that immediately betrays introversion as a coping mechanism. Wallace does and doesn’t want to meet his white friends by the lake. The opening paragraph of Brandon Taylor’s Real Life (Riverhead, 2020) tells the reader some important things right off the bat: It’s late summer. A Soaring Queer Campus Novel: Brandon Taylor’s Real Life
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