Brandon TaylorReal Life

examination of race, relocation, isolation, and identity. Sharply framed by the inscrutable family history of Zahira, a Moroccan immigrant in Paris, and her father’s sister, believed to have vanished in the 1950s, the narrative slaloms between characters, each coming to terms with the trajectories their lives have taken. Zannouba, a transgender sex worker on the cusp of surgical transition, idolizes Zahira’s effortless womanhood and grapples with letting go of her own lived experience in a male body; Mojtaba, a gay media correspondent, flees his native Iran, having been targeted publicly as a political revolutionary; Allal, Zahira’s childhood suitor, sets out for France to settle a score. One of the only openly gay Moroccan writers on record, Abdellah Taïa is, quite literally, the voice of a generation. Adroitly exploring amorphous, transmogrifying identities and the intrapersonal immigration between past and present selves in striking stream-of-consciousness, Taïa proves to us, as readers of this work, that there is credit in writing what you know (Taïa himself relocated to Paris from Morocco in the late 1990s). Originally published in French in 2015, A Country for Dying—here in its first English translation—emerges in an ethically and politically tumultuous 2020 as a salient means of analyzing the American sociopolitical climate against a global rubric. As we learn and unlearn and acknowledge and face head-on the ghosts of our past, we discover—alongside Zahira and Zannouba and Mojtaba and Allal—that our individual histories are furtive, insidious; they sink their teeth in deep and claw their way toward reckoning, whether we are ready to go there or not. Logan Webb Oklahoma City Brandon Taylor Real Life New York. Riverhead Books. 2020. 327 pages. AS A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, Brandon Taylor’s debut novel, Real Life, has already achieved the status of one of the best novels of 2020. Award nominations are often mired in the politics of selection, but Real Life undoubtedly deserves the attention it is receiving for expressing in luminous prose the ongoing struggles of Black lives on the margins of predominantly white spaces like research universities and liberal communities ostensibly open to diverse sexual orientations. The setting of Real Life is modeled after Madison, Wisconsin, a college town by Midwestern lakes, the setting where the protagonist, Wallace, a young, Black, and gay graduate student arrives from Alabama to make for himself a new life as a biochemistry researcher. Like a classical tragedy, events unfold over a dramatic late summer weekend, which, along with flashbacks to the past, shake the bearings of Wallace’s tenuous sense of identity forged during his four years of graduate student life. Taylor is unsparing in his depiction of the harsh competitiveness of graduate student life in research labs: the long hours of demanding work and the constant toll of being judged by peers and mentors. In Wallace’s case, these quotidian struggles are compounded by his fundamental isolation in being the only Black student in the lab and the only Black man in his group of friends. His intellectual abilities are constantly questioned, most of all by his adviser, Simone, who, while appearing to be nurturing, constantly undermines his successes and keeps him in a state of selfdoubt . The lab operates like a surveillance state with other graduate students watching Wallace’s progress and complaining to Simone. His relationship with Dana, an Asian American female graduate student, is particularly frayed and comes to a head when Dana accuses Wallace of misogyny and complains to Simone. The humiliation that Wallace faces at work is compounded by the callousness of his friends. Even though a large number of his friends are gay, he is aware that the gay community is predominantly white, and he will always be an outsider as a Black gay man in this group. Some “friends” remind him of his deficiencies, and while this is WORLDLIT.ORG 99 ostensibly referring to his lack of preparation for graduate school, for Wallace, it is a code for his lack of whiteness. Over the course of the weekend, Wallace begins a sexual liaison with his friend Miller, who insists that he is straight but is equally attracted to

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