Reviews with content warning for Fatphobia - Real Life

I find it difficult to describe this book. It’s about the experience of being gay and black in a predominantly white space. It’s about trauma and repression and repetition. It’s about invisibility but specifically about making yourself invisible.

I actually got this book at an event at my college a year and a half. Brandon Taylor read the first chapter, and I got a copy, and then I proceeded to not read it until now. But I follow him on Twitter, and I like his general persona and writing style, so maybe that affected some of my impressions of his novel.

Taylor’s writing really is gorgeous. I can’t remember the last time I marked so many beautiful or affecting lines in a book. And so much of this works beautifully, though I agree with other reviews that the last chapter felt like an odd note to end on in some ways.

It’s also a deeply pretentious book. And I’m okay with that! I’m a pretentious person in many ways, and I think fiction has the right to be pretentious and experimental and anything else it wants. But would this book, with all of its experiments with tense and point of view, have been published in this form, as a debut novel, if the author weren’t a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? Would it have gotten as much critical acclaim? I don’t think it would have.

I do think that Brandon Taylor deserves that critical acclaim. I just think maybe there’s another conversation to be had there. Maybe.

I was prepared for this to be a very heavy book going in, and it was. I was also prepared for it to be relatively plotless, and it’s that too. Taylor’s writing—and Wallace’s inner life—is what carries it. If you like plot-driven stories, this one will not be for you.

I was not prepared for the presence of SO MANY nematodes. There are a lot of dying nematodes in this book thanks to Wallace’s grad school research.

Content Warnings