Real Life (3*)

People have been telling fish out of water stories forever, but I can't recall reading any recounted from the perspective of a black, gay man from Alabama trying to escape his sexually abused past on a midwestern college campus. 

When I left it behind me, when I got up the money to go to school and get away, I sealed it all behind me, because when you go to another place you don’t have to carry the past with you. You can lay it down. You can leave it for the ants. There comes a time when you have to stop being who you were, when you have to let the past stay where it is, frozen and impossible. You have to let it go if you’re going to keep moving, if you’re going to survive, because the past doesn’t need a future. It has no use for what comes next. The past is greedy always swallowing you up, always taking. If you don’t hold it back, if you don’t damn it up, it will spread and take and drown. The past is not a receding horizon. Rather, it advances one moment at a time, marching steadily forward until it has claimed everything and we become again who we were; we become ghosts when the past catches us. I can’t live as long as my past does. It’s one or the other.

What was it that another Southerner once wrote?  "The past is never dead, it's not even past."  Wallace learns this the hard way when he falls for a violent, straight white guy who can't possibly relate to him although Miller pretends to try.

Real Life is probably more than a little autobiographical and certainly enlightening when it comes to the clueless and racist behavior of highly educated white people whom you think might know better.

Wallace pauses, stills in Miller’s arms. There will always be this moment. 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. No matter how good they are, no matter how loving, they will always be complicit, a danger, a wound waiting to happen. There is no amount of loving that will ever bring Miller closer to him in this respect. There is no amount of desire. There will always remain a small space between them, a space where people like Roman will take root and say ugly, hateful things to him. It’s the place in every white person’s heart where their racism lives and flourishes, not some vast open plain but a small crack, which is all it takes.

Brandon Taylor has written an eye-opening and very grim novel which turns on something I've long identified as a basic, but often overlooked human truth:  cooking for someone is an act of intimacy.  Unfortunately, his prose, likely weaned at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, occasionally overwhelms his unique voice.  While his descriptions of lab work and tennis volleys may provide metaphorical grist, they're too detailed for a generation weaned on visual imagery and slow down an otherwise heartbreaking first novel.