He censors his opinions and chooses his words carefully, steadfastly avoiding potentially awkward social situations. His mind is a place where fear, anger, mortality, and love rage. The hurt he experiences is visceral and, consequently, Wallace remains a closed book around others.Īn introverted and sensitive individual, he is victimised and ostracised seeing ‘Threats from every corner’, and I felt an extreme sense of sympathy for Wallace. Their lack of support exasperates Wallace: ‘No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen’. Meanwhile, his friends sit silently waiting for the awkward moment to pass. When racist comments casually fly across the table, Wallace remains silent to avoid being labelled antagonistic. This strained friendship is partly due to their discomfort around the topic of race. This group of supposed comrades – predominantly middle class and exclusively white – cannot fathom Wallace’s decision not to attend the funeral, failing to consider that his upbringing might not have resembled the nuclear family stereotype of their own. Responses are blunt and judgemental, reading ‘It was your dad, Wallace!’.
When Wallace’s friends discover the news of his father’s death, they’re shocked by his apathy. Yet, as the summer draws to close, it isn’t just the season longing for change in this evocative and provocative novel. Seeking a source of temporary relief, Wallace decides to ‘meet his friends at the pier after all’. Wallace is struggling his father has just passed away, his experiment has been destroyed by contamination and the relationship with his friends is crumbling. Set in a Midwestern town, Booker Prize short-listed Real Life by Brandon Taylor follows Wallace, a black biochemistry postgraduate student.
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