PositiveThe New Yorker... a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines ... One clear achievement of Real Life is that it instantiates the indignities of this setting without invoking the hackneyed language that has come to dominate contemporary discussions of campus culture ... It would be easy for Taylor’s novel to settle on an indictment of this culture, whose exhausting absurdity—Why report a racist colleague’s comments to a supervisor who seems no better?—is a worthy subject of satire. But Real Life doubles as a sophisticated character study of someone squaring self-preservation with a duty to tolerate people who threaten it. The book teems with passages of transfixing description ... The flip side of Taylor’s exquisite rendition of Wallace’s remove is that it can blunt the rendition of his surroundings. Loneliness occasions moments of melodrama that bloat the prose.
