But his eyelashes are blond, his eyebrows are blond, and his beard is mostly a white-yellow…” and I just thought to myself, this is so much internalized racism, this glorification of blondness and this association between whiteness and beauty. For example, when Wallace first meets Roman, a character who is extremely cruel, he thinks to himself “Roman is very handsome – so blond that Wallace thinks he cannot be naturally so. My first extreme disappointment with Real Life stems from how I feel like a lot of the problematic and oppressive things within the novel are not addressed in a way that really calls them out. Though also a major frustration of mine with this novel, I can somehow respect how much Taylor commits to rendering Wallace’s sadness and helplessness, given the enormous weight of the world he lives in. Wallace’s sadness – from his trauma with his family, from the racism he encounters, from feeling invisible and isolated in his small town – cuts deep and feels real. Brandon Taylor does an excellent job of showing the anger and then learned helplessness Wallace experiences due to overt and subtle racism throughout the book. I appreciate some of what it portrays, the struggles of Wallace, a gay black biochemistry graduate student living in the Midwest. Though it pains me to write it, this book and I just did not fit well together much at all.
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