RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewIn Taylor’s stunning debut, Real Life, quiet diligence toward one’s goals mutates into a spiral that leaves the mind and body bruised as if survivors of a psychic war zone ... a novel that probes — painstakingly, with the same microscopic precision its protagonist uses in the lab — the ways that an anxious queer black brain is mutated by the legacies of growing up in a society...where the body that houses it is not welcome. It is a curious novel to describe, for much of the plot involves excavating the profound from the mundane ... Taylor proves himself to be a keen observer of the psychology of not just trauma, but its repercussions: how private suffering can ricochet from one person to injure those caught in his path ... The novel’s at times stunted and awkward dialogue...can clash with its often tight, beatific prose. Yet much like the tropes of queer literary lust that populate the final half of the novel...even this halting dialogue never feels wholly out of step with Wallace’s psyche, which itself functions in discordant, sometimes off-putting, thrillingly contradictory ways. Add to all this Taylor’s deeply rooted understandings of the rarefied worlds of both provincial grad school life and biochemistry in particular, which should inspire envy in every writer striving for specificity. There is a delicacy in the details of working in a lab full of microbes and pipettes that dances across the pages like the feet of a Cunningham dancer: pure, precise poetry ... Taylor subjugates us with the deft hand of a dom to the airless vertigo that rests at the heart of the spiral.
