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Ryan Patrick Smith
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The Death Metal Pastorals
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SRPR, Spoon River Poetry Review, 44.1 Summer, 2019
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Selva Casal (Contributor),
Jeannine M. Pitas (Translator)
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I started reading Real Life in a burst, followed by a stall when my own real life intruded, and my time poured itself instead into a summer teaching assignment. But I finished Brandon Taylor’s Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut novel two weeks later. This
I started reading Real Life in a burst, followed by a stall when my own real life intruded, and my time poured itself instead into a summer teaching assignment. But I finished Brandon Taylor’s Booker-shortlisted 2020 debut novel two weeks later. This interrupted commitment felt appropriate for the protagonist, Wallace, a gay Black biochemistry grad student who, over the course of a summer weekend following the death of his abusive estranged father, either politely but anxiously withdraws from the company of his grad student cohort, wants to withdraw, or is weighing the pressure to decide whether or not to withdraw from the shelter of his larger context: protection from the noisome wounds and accumulated traumas of his gay Black boyhood in Alabama by his escape into the sterilized shell of white academia, where life under its ordinary survival pressures can be substituted with the model organisms of the nematodes he dissects, the slides he prepares with precision and patience, and the experimental data he contributes to other students’ projects; most of all, where real life can be substituted with the promise of safety. But, Wallace discovers, though he’s sought escape in white academia, its carefully calibrated ethos of excellence and election end up re-inflicting the very rejection it promised to shelter him from. I haven’t met a more quietly alienated character in a literary novel in a long time; I guess alienation is the default for a grad student, if the grad school memories that Wallace prodded in me are to be trusted. Deeper than mere relatability, though, Wallace updates specifically Black modernist precursors like Ellison’s Invisible Man as much as Bartleby. In the lab, Wallace’s technical giftedness, his care and efficiency, is dismissed by his supervisor and collaborators and reframed, instead, through a degrading stereotype of Black effort: he’s the workhorse, “a savant or a trained circus seal,” whose skill “does not reflect a superiority on his part…as much as it demonstrates that Wallace has time to burn, time for the idle stupidity it takes to sit in front of a scope and wait for hours.” If academia is now too progressive to outright animalize him, it can still only value him if it sees him as useful and meek. His supervisor and peers’ borderline resentful acknowledgement of his talent, of course, doesn’t protect him from his supervisor’s later accusation of carelessness after his nematode specimens die in what’s heavily signaled to be an act of jealous sabotage by a white fellow student, one who is herself collapsing inside the vacuum of the contemporary university STEM lab and the frailty of her own mediocrity. The supervisor, the demanding and microaggressive Simone, later drives the novel’s rather submerged climax by putting the question of withdrawal to Wallace that he’s been avoiding for the whole 300-page weekend: does he want to be here? (Such questions are an academic supervisor’s gentle way of notifying a student that it’s time to find something else to do. This gentleness is always savage). Does Wallace want to be here? Did I? I sometimes wondered why, in the wake of robust interventions like Parul Sehgal’s “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” and Andrea Long Chu’s “Hanya’s Boys,” I didn’t just walk away from another drama of queer racialized suffering’s wide ripples from the past into the present. Sehgal has already identified the impulse of contemporary storytelling to reach back into a character’s past suffering to explain their characterization, as if the present is too static and stagnant to offer a protagonist or their author anything to work with — they must always be reacting to the shadows of the flashback (a psychological mechanism, Sehgal observed, that followed the invention of movies). Long Chu won a Pulitzer on the strength of an argument that Hanya Yanagihara can’t imagine love except as a palliative devotion to suffering, which devotion also requires an author ready to dole the suffering out. Real Life’s generically realist title (all realist fiction could be titled Real Life) is given nutrients by the fact that Taylor isn’t interested in the operatic dramaturgy of Wallace’s trauma. He’s interested in several different meanings of real life, and not just his protagonist’s CPTSD: non-academic life (academics seem obsessed with the notion that where they are and what they do somehow bubbles away from reality); the kind of life that is not artificial or synthetic, and thus, not grant-eligible now that research funding is driven by the needs of modern biotech, “an industry that built scanners and devices, a harvest of organs, serums, and patches sprung from genetic mash”; and most of all, the real life, as grounding as it was traumatic, of Wallace’s history and rural Black Southernness. Real life can be glimpsed in Wallace’s persistent unhappiness with his milieu’s disdain for things like “real food” (“What do you want, asparagus? Some sprouts? Real food. What even is that?” says one character, after another suggests that he’d not like to subsist for an afternoon on lake pier ice cream and pitchers of beer). In other words, real life, for the characters surrounding Wallace, is nearly unimaginable. But if it must be imagined, it’s the life of slovenly nematodes who dare make the unvirtuous faux pas, as Wallace does, of bringing a meat dish cooked from a family recipe to a dinner party of upscale vegan grad students. (Oh, the grad school potluck! Wallace, it’s a world of food you only make to prove a point about yourself, and the point is never about your authenticity or your love language). The real genetic mash from which much of this novel’s unhappiness springs are race and class, and not for nothing does Wallace start to realize that his unhappiness may not be just the long tail of his horrific childhood abuse and the homophobic rejection he experienced from his parents, nor the prerequisite for acknowledgement, love, or safety. Real life, actually, is in the molecular bond of intimacy, in just shutting up and telling your story (to coin a paradox) to someone else, as he finally does to another character, even if the aftermath feels more like panic. How he acts from this realization, though, is something the novel leaves unresolved. Though the novel grazes against the Trauma Plot, it also anticipates the limits of that plot’s passivity, its infant baptism of its characters in Backstory, and its totalizing mythology of suffering. Wallace, the novel keeps telling us, is still agentic. That Wallace’s responsibility for the consequences of his actions is repeatedly belabored by a friend group of exhaustingly toxic white grad students, nearly all of them gay or pseudostraight, dutifully bourgeois in their preferences and tastes, who mostly exist to let him down and deflect from their own betrayals— the reverent caretakers Chu describes in her dissection of A Little Life’s Jude, they are not — does not refute Taylor’s underlying insight that trauma might have a hand in our present pain, for which we are not at fault, but it’s not responsible for the ramifications of our own bullshit. Do we seal ourselves away in the lab of our interiority, where, with the excuse of our microscopes, we can literally keep our heads down? Absolutely. Are we accountable for what we therefore fail to see, the wounds we reify? Yes. Like Bartleby, Wallace can prefer not to, when he prefers not to; unlike Bartleby, however, he’s just as apt to accede, to internalize, and to forgive so as not to deal, and one can get the impression that the majority of his dialogue consists in variations of “it’s fine” when it is, in fact, racist and classist, while his inner monologue keeps telling him he deserves it. Meanwhile, another character of color, the Korean-American Brigit, has to remind Wallace that Simone once asked her for a Japanese recipe, and that if she cured cancer, as an Asian-American it would just be considered par for the course. This novel about race, class, and the STEM side of academia is also a novel that represents contemporary queer Black interiority, in itself a moving posture in part because, as chaotic and poisonous as Wallace’s friends are, this novel represents a gay Black author writing a gay Black protagonist in community with other gay men. Though no worshipful company, Taylor’s rendering of a friend group reminds me of every friendship’s oscillations between love and exclusion, alliance and othering, without sacrificing the specific structural reasons that Wallace’s circle of white gay men alternately reach for Wallace and then leave him out. When one of these friends, an ersatz straight character named Miller turned Wallace’s weekend lover, climactically introduces the trope that a straight man’s trauma will always express itself in love through violence, the novel at least does not sacrifice Wallace’s agency to render him the victim of Miller’s wolfishness. Instead, it tries to put Wallace in charge of the masochism he embraces, and the reader in charge of their response to it. My response? Consent is hard to grant as granted when someone is already squeezing a character’s windpipe, and if Taylor wanted to give Wallace another drowning to see whether he’d find his way to air, then there are other lakes he could have thrown him in. I thus wasn’t sure how to feel about the transformed character dynamic with Miller, who begins his relationship with Wallace not as a volatile reagent, but a figure meant to test Wallace’s own low-key volatility, his caginess toward accepting love. Throughout my reading of the novel, I wasn’t always sure how to feel about Wallace — cut all of these people but Brigit out of your life, I wanted to tell him, but that’s also the kind of shit I’ve told myself to just as much avail. And both Taylor and Wallace know the systemic causes of his isolation, the reasons for his tendency toward pacification, toward acceptance of blame, toward saying “you’re right” and “I’m sorry.” These people, from Wallace’s perspective, happen to own the boats, the oars, and the life-vests, and so, when one is in their boat, one is inclined to deference (interrupted by the occasional bout of truth-telling and shit-stirring: the need to rock the boat just to prove it’s actually in the water). Wallace might be accused of morose navel-gazing, of only projecting himself onto the world and the world onto himself—as a morose navel-gazer myself, I winced, I felt stung, I empathized—but many reviewers have credited Taylor for crafting that gaze with a trained biochemist’s precision. Often, I agree. In the lab, describing what it’s like to ready yourself for a task that you’ve been dreading, Taylor’s observational acumen can magnify: a lab bench “is wide, black, and smooth, made chalky from years of sliding the hexagonal bases of Bunsen burners or the hard feet of microscopes across its surface.” In navigating the messy, careless gestures of friends getting drunk on a pier, Taylor similarly calibrates his lens to notice how a dropped ice cream spots Wallace’s wrist with “a drop of white—lukewarm like spit,” extending his friends’ carelessness to Wallace’s bodily presence. When two characters get in an argument and their shifting bodies tilt the table, Taylor tracks that there are nachos on it and they must be saved from falling off, which aligns Taylor as organizer of details with Wallace as organizer of lab materials, and the one who most tracks the motion of his friends’ chaos even as they barely notice him. “Precision” would also imply that Taylor’s details, metaphors, and similes are rich with data, even as they tend to the sensory and mood-setting, or reach for the abstract: the way “the aroma of food cut against the putrid sweetness of the lake. Dying plants” does its job, and it also enfolds Wallace’s apprehension of the lake and preoccupation with the dying organisms in his lab; the baseline, inescapable whiteness of Wallace’s midwest university town asserts itself in flashes of pale skin and tanlines whenever a shirt lifts up and presents Wallace’s environment as a series of subtle but sharp data points; the way Wallace, in the lab with his nematodes of the self, “had gotten to the perimeter of an idea, could feel the bounds of its questions, the depth and width of its concerns,” if abstractly formed, still colors Wallace with the scientific curiosity that also must exist in his character to make him believable. For Taylor does see parallels in the way trauma might train one to be a scientist, a hypervigilant analyst of one’s surroundings who self-protectively embraces the observational margins, and in those margins, indulges something like hope. I suppose it’s that “charged potential,” to use another phrase of Taylor’s, that returned me to Real Life to finish it. The novel’s last chapter never resolves whether Wallace will leave academia (perhaps because academia has chosen for him). Instead, it returns like an ouroboros to Wallace’s arrival from Alabama to the shore of the great midwestern lake, and the apprehension toward it with which the novel started. His cohort of fellow students welcome him at the bus station: “These were to be his friends here, the people who looked after him.” If, in the novel’s opening sentence, going to the lake for an outing with these friends represents a choice made against a reluctant impulse grounded in months of dejection, in the novel’s end, in Wallace’s first encounter, the lake’s vastness startles him, and to stand at the top of the steps to the boat that will ferry him to the school threatens him with the fear that he will be swallowed. That swallowing might be the foreboding that often accompanies hope for anyone trained to know danger. If Wallace is the tail, that swallowing might be the mouth of the snake. ...more |
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Jul 25, 2026 01:26PM
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