Real Life

It hasn't been easy to explain why I like this novel so much (Laura and Nancy and the Booker Prize judges do too), but I think it comes down to what it's like to be inside the head of Wallace, the gay African American Big Ten biochemistry grad student whose real life you share for a few alternately slack and intense summer days. He's a hard one to get to know, for his friends and for a reader, armored with defenses and then suddenly so bristly and vulnerable when those defenses are pierced that you might need to turn away. The vulnerability might remind you of Kiese Laymon's Heavy, but you might also think of Sally Rooney's novels, with their similar deliberately banal titles and similarly drifting, passionate twentysomethings.