"Together, Alone: On Reading Brandon Taylor’s REAL LIFE During the Pandemic" by Robert Haller
There’s probably a psychological term for the act of re-contextualizing everything in light of a new phenomenon or collective experience, but if there is, I don’t know it. Still, since the pandemic began, it’s been interesting to see how our relationship to art and entertainment has changed, now that it’s filtered through this new dystopian lens we’ve been forced to acquire. While a good book or batch of songs can take years to formulate and find its way into the world, the world itself can alter with no warning. This has always been the case, but usually the world doesn’t alter so suddenly and irreversibly. Every now and then, however, something comes along—a world war, an election, a pandemic—and we find ourselves living in a new reality, seemingly overnight. In the case of the pandemic, the change was so swift and sudden for most of us that without more than a moment’s notice we felt we were living in a strange new world.
Novels that were written years before COVID-19, but released publicly into this world, occupy a unique place in the public consciousness. It’s hard for us not to expect these books to say something specific about a phenomenon the writer was just as clueless about as the rest of us, at the time of their writing. If they fail this task, we—the entertainment-starved, shut-in public—get to feel superior, as if we acquired the benefit of hindsight by simply reading a novel a few months or years after it was written. If only they knew. But one of the beauties of good literature is its capacity to interact and engage in dialogue with reality in any moment. Novels don’t exist is a vacuum. The reader brings to the pages their experiences and preconceptions, and a conversation begins.
Brandon Taylor’s debut novel REAL LIFE was published in February 2020, but I didn’t get my hands on it until the summer. The protagonist of the novel is Wallace, a biochemistry student working towards a graduate degree at an unnamed Midwestern university. Wallace has a group of friends, but is experiencing alienation, for a variety of reasons. The university is predominantly white, and Wallace is Black. He is from rural Alabama, and experiences in his childhood and adolescence have taught him to be suspicious of people and keep them at arm’s length. Many of the interactions Wallace has with members of the white academic community during his time at the university only justify this distrust. The steady drip of micro-aggressions, belittlements, and condescending remarks that Wallace endures from his colleagues and friends causes him to reflect, “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.”
There is much to love about Taylor’s debut. He is a master of detail. Like his hyper self-aware protagonist, he can laser in on one specific action of a character and make it pulse with undisclosed meaning. It’s been a long time since I read a book that mined a character’s interiority with such complexity and nuance.
The book has been described as a “campus novel,” and like Sally Rooney’s Normal People, it’s full of young adults with a host of anxieties, fears, suspicions and prejudices. When Taylor throws them all together at a dinner party, the tension is so palpable I felt I was sitting beside Wallace at the table. Questions of complicity, apathy, and the tensions between self and a larger community bubble to the surface. The very premise of community is interrogated here: Who is allowed in? What are the hierarchies and power dynamics involved? What humilities or untruths must one suffer and endure in order to be part of one?
Reading this book during a time when I, like so many others, have been more or less isolated from any physical community, I found Taylor’s treatment of it particularly compelling. Near the end of the novel, a scene in which Wallace and a friend get ice cream by the pier while people gather to hear a local band takes on a melancholy, almost eerie resonance as Wallace observes his surroundings:
Hundreds of people are gathered now on the pier and at the tables, thronging the area. It’s maybe the last good weekend of weather for such things. Soon, they’ll have to shut it down. Just a few weeks left before the end.
Taylor’s attention to the details of the communal setting make Wallace’s isolation and alienation that much more acute.
As the country continues its patchwork response to the pandemic, with states and counties in various stages of shutting down again, physical community remains elusive. It will most likely be a very long time before the majority of us feel comfortable gathering for a concert and eating ice cream. The scene filled me with a strange sadness, not just simple nostalgia or a wish for things to be back to “normal,” but a sense of longing, perhaps, at an ideal unrealized. What Taylor gets so right, here, is that community is by nature an elusive thing, never fully realized. There is an inherent melancholy to the idea of community, a paradoxical loneliness that lingers. In the best of times, through rituals like concerts and brunches and parties and drinks with friends, we strive to feel part of something bigger than ourselves, less alone, more connected. But, as Taylor illustrates so deftly in this novel, there are so many ways to make one another feel excluded.
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Robert Haller received his MFA from the New School in 2015, and his short writing has most recently appeared in LitHub and Joyland. His debut novel ANOTHER LIFE was published by Blackstone Publishing in 2019. He lives in upstate New York.
