Novels about biochemists are rare. Novels about gay black biochemists are surely nonexistent, until now; in this slender niche appears Real Life, a truly unusual first novel.
Set over the course of a long weekend in an unnamed midwestern American university, the novel’s protagonist is Wallace, a gay black biochemistry grad student from a small town in Alabama. There are three strands to this novel: race, sexual orientation, and laboratory dynamics, and all three play out in vivid detail over the course of the novel.
A few pages in, it is clear that Wallace does not blend in to the mass of graduate students.
Their class had been the first small one in quite some time, and the first in more than three decades to include a black person. In his less generous moments, Wallace though these two things related, that a narrowing, a reduction in the number of applicants, had made his admission possible
Gay grad students are more common, and in fact Wallace’s small group of (white) friends includes the gay couple of Cole and Vincent, as well as Yngve who is somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Then there’s Emma, in a relationship with Thom. (‘Emma and Wallace had become friends by virtue of the fact that neither of them was a white man in their program’). And there’s Miller, tall and cautious with Wallace:
They fell into that chilly silence that comes between two people who ought to be close but who are not because of some early, critical miscalculation. Wallace had come to regret the impasse, because it precluded their discussing the things they shared: They’d both been the first in their families to go to college; they had both been cowed upon arrival by the size of this particular Midwestern city, they were both unusual among their friends in that they were unaccustomed to the easiness of life. But here they were.
The descriptions of Wallace’s work in the lab are evocative, beautifully capturing the immeasurable tedium and the peaceful repetitiveness of most benchwork.
Picking twelve worms from fifty plates means six hundred plates, all of which have to be passaged multiple times to free them of the mold[…]
Wallace reaches for his pick, a glass capillary melted around a flattened segment of titanium wire. He holds a metal striker over the burner, turns on the gas, strikes. The rotten, faintly sweet smell of natural gas, then ignition, orange glow, a few sparks dissolve, fire. He burns the end of his pick to sterilize it. […] He waits for signs of movement, rotates the glass in the base of the microscope to change the angle of light so that things shift into curious metallic shadow, searches, waits, searches, rotates, waits, searches.
One worm.
Five hundred ninety-nine to go.
He lowers the pick. Begins.
Lab work has not been going well for Wallace. He spends many hours at his bench, but sometimes, and somehow, experiments don’t always work as they should. In the intense pressure-cooker atmosphere of a graduate lab with students all dependent on one another’s experiments, all eager to get their PhDs done with and get out into the world, the interpersonal social and academic dynamics cannot be avoided.
At times all three strands intermingle ferociously. Dana, another student who is thought by the lab chief to be ‘gifted’, is resentful and edgy around Wallace.
‘You know what I think, Wallace? I think you’re a misogynist’.
The word flicks by him, a shooting dart of silver. There’s a momentary grit of bitter regret at the back of his throat.
‘I am not a misogynist’.
‘You don’t get to define what misogyny is to a woman, asshole. You don’t get to. […] Fucking gays always think that they’ve got the corner on oppression. ‘
The author may or may not be good at picking out worms under a microscope, but he is certainly very good at precisely identifying and outlining the subtleties of human interactions.
He tried once, with Simone [the lab chief] to talk about the way Katie talks to him as though he is inept. He said to Simone, She doesn’t talk that way to anyone else. She doesn’t treat them like this. And Simon said, Wallace. Don’t be dramatic. It isn’t racism. You just need to catch up. Work harder.
The most unfair part of it, Wallace thinks, is that when you tell white people that something is racist, they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth. As if they can tell by the grain if something is racist or not, and they always trust their own judgement.
Over the course of the three days, Wallace begins a relationship with Miller that is tense, complicated by the fact that Miller is supposedly straight, by their races, and by their own pasts. At a dinner, a French grad student makes a pointed statement about Wallace’s academic ‘deficiencies’, implying that Wallace was only in the program because of his race.
‘You come from a challenging background. It is unfortunate, but it is how it is.’
There is silence, no one challenges this statement, and then someone asks for the wine to smooth over the moment. Later:
Wallace pauses, still in Miller’s arms. There will always be good white people who love him and want the best for him, but who are more afraid of other white people than of letting him down. It is easier for them to let it happen and to triage the wound later than to introduce an element of the unknown into the situation.
As they get closer, Wallace tells Miller about his past, about the small miserable house in Alabama where he grew up, about the boarder who came into his room at night, about the boy he liked who beat him up after sex in the woods, about his father’s grinning reaction to the abuse. This is a painful retelling, and it is painful to read as well. Almost as tense, painful and violent is the relationship between Wallace and Miller. These sections of the novel are agonizingly raw and brutal.
There is much more to the book: loneliness and vulnerability, the tenuous graduate school path to a career, Wallace’s fierce internal honesty and intense, thoughtful, self-protective observations of others. It is deeply contemplative but never slips into self-absorbed navel-gazing.
A startling debut indeed. Given that the framework of the novel is autobiographical — Taylor was a gay black biochemistry grad student at U. Wisconsin before turning to writing — I wonder what his next project will be, and await it with great interest.
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