![]() ![]() “This is to make you better.”Ĭondescension of this kind recurs throughout “Real Life,” a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines. “This isn’t to punish you,” Wallace was told. ![]() The last time he denied an accusation of carelessness, she sided with a colleague, forcing Wallace to sort and then re-sort a set of reagents that someone else had mixed up. Alone in the bay of a laboratory, he oversees the creatures’ feverish reproductive cycles under a microscope, “herding desired chromosomes and wicking away the undesired ones,” in search of the “sought-after strain.” Magnified, the contamination on his plates resembles “one of those horrible re-creations of a volcanic event-whole civilizations frozen in ash and soot and coarse white stone.” It also seems “entirely unaccidental.” Wallace suspects sabotage but is too shrewd to try to prove it to his supervisor, a harried white woman who conveys constant doubt about his competence. Wallace, who breeds nematodes, has spent the summer trying to induce a specific genetic mutation. Photograph by Vivian Le / NYT / ReduxĮarly in “ Real Life,” Brandon Taylor’s brooding début novel, a biochemistry student named Wallace removes his agar plates from a shared incubator to find that mold has tainted several days’ worth of work. Brandon Taylor’s début, “Real Life,” shadows Wallace, a gay black student from a small Southern town. ![]()
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