The truth of that feeling fit under his skin like a new, uncomfortable self.” Wallace is, of course, depressed. “But running through that feeling like hard, resolute bone was something else: It wasn’t so much that he wanted to leave graduate school as that he wanted to leave his life. “Yes, he thought about leaving, and yes, he hated it here sometimes,” Taylor writes. He loathes the red tape of academia, but “real life” is something he can’t seem to activate. He craves Miller but worries that the rangy WASP is just toying with him before returning to the straight world. Almost preternaturally incapable of getting worked up about anything, from ice cream to professional setbacks, Wallace slogs from lab to apartment to brunch without any sense of direction. Wallace’s emotional distance seems at first like a narrative barrier but ultimately becomes the fulcrum of the plot. Their first sex scene, related without drama, argues for a near-future in which non-heteronormative lovemaking is unremarkable: “Miller lay on top of him and drew the blanket over their bodies, and Wallace, for the first time in a long time, let someone inside him.” Miller is white and straight and into sailing - but he’s also into Wallace. There are at least two gay couples, a straight couple, a nastily effete European and a couple of dudes. His friends are mostly colleagues: Like innumerable grad students, they gather on evenings and weekends to drink, vape, eat and talk. The novel begins just weeks after he learned of his father’s death, as he struggles to share the news with colleagues and friends. When Wallace was in middle school in Alabama, his father left the family, relocating five minutes away but never contacting them again. He studies a type of worm called nematodes - unimportant creatures, except for the data they can provide to the head of the lab, an imperious woman named Simone who mistakes Wallace’s flat affect for indifference, though it really stems from trauma. Wallace is a graduate student at an unnamed large Midwestern university (Taylor holds a degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison). This transference of affect telegraphs Wallace’s shame over his past, even as he puzzles over what future he might have. “ Giovanni’s Room,” James Baldwin’s great novel of desire, identity and alienation, echoes meaningfully throughout “Real Life,” not simply because one character grapples with bisexuality but because Taylor takes that store clerk’s flat tone of voice and gives it to his protagonist, Wallace.
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