Brandon Taylor's Real Life

I reviewed Brandon Taylor’s debut Real Life for Bookforum.

I cut an observation from this review that I’ve been thinking about since I filed it. Taylor’s protagonist, Wallace, is nauseated. He throws up, and feels like throwing up, repeatedly in the novel. There is a psychological element to this characterization — the character has very disordered eating, due to his painful and impoverished childhood, but it serves as a metaphorical connection to a whole swath of Black expatriate novels from the 1950s and 60s. In Wright and Baldwin, characters often vomit, especially after tense exchanges. I had always connected that impulse to those writers’ investments in and reading of existentialist philosophy, but when reading Taylor’s novel, I thought of it in relation to expatriation more broadly. Wallace, though he is in an American university and was raised in an American state and town, experiences the world he finds himself in as a foreign country: the problem of the novel is what to do when you feel like an immigrant in a country you ostensibly belong to? It’s a remarkable debut, and I’m excited to read his next book(s).