The quiet, nuanced novel examines the complicated ways race works within academia: a white classmate suggests admissions officers accepted Wallace despite his “challenging background” and “deficiencies” a white female lab partner lashes out at Wallace and shouts that gay men hog the conversation on oppression. “So many of my queer, black friends were like, ‘We’re here on college campuses and yet none of these stories represent us in any sort of substantive way.’ So I told myself, I’m going to imagine myself at the center of this space.”ĭrawn from Taylor’s own experiences, the queer black protagonist of Real Life, Wallace, struggles to navigate the prejudgments and biases of the white cohorts in his PhD program. An expansion of the kind of novels he loves to read, but rarely sees himself in. Real Life is a campus novel, Taylor asserts. So how does Taylor want to be seen and talked about as a writer? In his glowing review, Jeremy O Harris, the author of Slave Play, who is also queer and black, wrote that Taylor excavated “the profound from the mundane”. Real Life has received praise from Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist the poet Garth Greenwell, and the writer Danielle Evans. Writing a novel ruins your life in really specific ways. You can discover Taylor discussing everything from the craft of writing to the pros and cons of literary genres, and also going viral with a quote from Amy Adams thirsting over her fellow Miss Pettigrew actor Lee Pace. There he seamlessly bounces between highbrow and lowbrow. He attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and harnessed the power of Twitter to create a distinctive brand for himself. Taylor has spent the past few years quietly and steadily building up a name for himself. “I’m like, what Baldwin novel is this book in conversation with?” Taylor shouts, exasperated. “There’s this way black art is talked about,” he says, “that is invisible to white people.” These loaded comments show up when Taylor is compared to James Baldwin more frequently than contemporary writers such as Sally Rooney and Rachel Cusk, who also mine the lives of messy, overeducated twentysomethings.
One reviewer called Taylor’s novel, which takes place entirely on an unnamed midwestern university campus, a “heartbreaking tale of southern childhood trauma”. Mostly because the work of black writers often receives these coded, confining labels, much as rap music is often called “urban” and black fashion is called “streetwear”. He hates when his work is called “raw” and “visceral”.
0 kommentar(er)
