He refers to his friends as “his particular group of white people.” The town locals he calls “real people,” and he is amazed at “how quickly he has forgotten to move among such people, who seem rough and ugly when they look at him.”
On the other hand, Wallace is deeply aware of how white and how sheltered the university is, and he has a sense that this quality makes it unreal. When the only member of his friend group who is not a student says, “There’s more to life than programs and jobs,” Wallace replies, “I’m not entirely sure that’s true.” He believes he has entirely discarded his past, his desperately unhappy childhood as a queer black kid in the rural south, so that now, with “his previous life cut away like a cataract,” he has rendered it no longer real. It consumes his time, his energy, his attention: All he does is sit in the lab behind his microscope, studying nematodes.
On the one hand, Wallace is devoted to his program, in which he is the only black student to enroll in the past three decades. Our protagonist, Wallace, is a grad student studying biochemistry at a university in the Midwest, and he is ambivalent as to whether his life as a student could be said to constitute “real life.” The central question of Real Life, the debut novel from short story writer and Iowa MFA grad Brandon Taylor, is: What is real life?
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