Brandon Taylor’s début, “Real Life,” shadows Wallace, a gay black student from a small Southern town. Photograph by Vivian Le / NYT / Redux

Early in “Real Life,” Brandon Taylor’s brooding début novel, a biochemistry student named Wallace removes his agar plates from a shared incubator to find that mold has tainted several days’ worth of work. Wallace, who breeds nematodes, has spent the summer trying to induce a specific genetic mutation. Alone in the bay of a laboratory, he oversees the creatures’ feverish reproductive cycles under a microscope, “herding desired chromosomes and wicking away the undesired ones,” in search of the “sought-after strain.” Magnified, the contamination on his plates resembles “one of those horrible re-creations of a volcanic event—whole civilizations frozen in ash and soot and coarse white stone.” It also seems “entirely unaccidental.” Wallace suspects sabotage but is too shrewd to try to prove it to his supervisor, a harried white woman who conveys constant doubt about his competence. The last time he denied an accusation of carelessness, she sided with a colleague, forcing Wallace to sort and then re-sort a set of reagents that someone else had mixed up. “This isn’t to punish you,” Wallace was told. “This is to make you better.”

Condescension of this kind recurs throughout “Real Life,” a campus novel imagined from the vantage of a character who is usually shunted to the sidelines. Taylor’s début shadows Wallace, a gay black student from a small town in Alabama, through a series of personal and professional skirmishes that complicate the last weekend before his fourth year of graduate school. When the book opens, Wallace is pondering whether he ought to leave his university and the predominantly white, Midwestern town that houses it. The loss of his nematodes is the second death that is introduced in the opening pages. Taylor relegates the first to a numb aside: Wallace’s father has just died. His decision to skip the funeral scandalizes his breezy white friends—one of whom, a histrionic Swede, spent the summer before graduate school summiting a mountain to mourn the death of his grandfather. “It was your dad,” another friend reminds Wallace, as though he does not remember. Wallace seems to like these people—perhaps most of all Miller, a surly, mercurial scientist, and the quietest in their group—but none of them manages to comprehend the “curious shape of his grief, which does not bear the typical dimensions.” Wallace holds his friends at a remove, leaving unexplained the childhood trauma that has predisposed him to introversion and distanced him from his family in the first place.

The memories emerge drip by drip, as if from the tip of a pipette. Raised in poverty by parents who allowed an adult friend to abuse him, Wallace left home in search of reprieve. At graduate school, he discovers not a fresh start but another site of suppression. His doctoral group, we learn at the novel’s outset, is the first in more than three decades to include a black person. In springtime, at fund-raising garden parties, “wealthy white people fling bits of bread at koi and talk in hushed, slurred voices about the changing demographics of the university.” Wallace recalls being introduced, at one such event, to his fellowship’s benefactor, “a heavy, bearded man” who reeks of “sweat and oak leaves.” His narrative clarifies a punishing paradox of academia; the gatekeepers of Wallace’s university at once subjugate him and imply that such subjugation is a requisite for success, even a blessing for someone from his “background.” When Wallace voices his ambivalence about staying in the program, a snarling, French acquaintance cites the “prospects for . . . black people”—dismal, apparently—and questions his gratitude. Without a doctorate, the acquaintance adds, “the stats are what they are.”

One clear achievement of “Real Life” is that it instantiates the indignities of this setting without invoking the hackneyed language that has come to dominate contemporary discussions of campus culture. Taylor, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop who, like Wallace, trained as a biochemist, endows his narrative with the precision of science and the intimacy of memoir. Wallace isn’t one to whine about “microaggressions”; he doesn’t carp at “cultural appropriation.” What he endures, and what Taylor catalogues with aplomb, is a relentless abrasion of dignity that is familiar to many people of color on such campuses. In line at a corner store, waiting to buy deodorant and soap, Wallace is mistaken for a drug dealer by a drunk fraternity brother. At the front door of a friend’s home, he’s rebuffed by a vegan acquaintance who wrinkles her nose at his potluck offering and asks whether he is lost. In the lab, he endures the degradations of the peer who seems to have sabotaged his experiment, a “panting, miserable” white girl. Interrupting Wallace’s work one morning, she calls him a misogynist, accuses him of feeling that he’s “got the corner on oppression,” and declares, almost unbelievably, in the next beat, that “women are the new niggers, the new faggots.”

It would be easy for Taylor’s novel to settle on an indictment of this culture, whose exhausting absurdity—Why report a racist colleague’s comments to a supervisor who seems no better?—is a worthy subject of satire. But “Real Life” doubles as a sophisticated character study of someone squaring self-preservation with a duty to tolerate people who threaten it. The book teems with passages of transfixing description, and perhaps its greatest asset is the force of Wallace’s isolation, which Taylor conveys with alien strangeness. Watching white friends eat dinner, Wallace fixates on “their shining eyes” and “their greasy fingers working at each other’s knees” in “a pantomime of intimacy.” The night before, students revelling on the shore of the university’s lakeside campus had “pried their mouths apart and beamed their laughter into each other’s faces.”

The flip side of Taylor’s exquisite rendition of Wallace’s remove is that it can blunt the rendition of his surroundings. Loneliness occasions moments of melodrama that bloat the prose. Mugs crouch in Wallace’s cupboard like “children in foster care.” Of a table that tilts under the shifting weight of his friends, he wonders, “Would it hold them? Would it last?” These moments expose both the burden of Wallace’s trauma and the liability of transcribing it; at times, Wallace’s problem threatens to become the novel’s. His tendency to discount the “clumps of white people” who crowd his daily life—the Harvard alumna with “expensive teeth” who mentions, offhand, that she did her “undergrad in Boston,” or all of those strangers by the lake, “white and in ugly, oversize clothes, sunburned and chapped and smiling”—risks skimming the book’s secondary cast of a meaningful specificity. Wallace’s most disdainful observations reduce even a few of his better friends to the sort of schematic creations that appear under his microscope.

And yet schematism is the essence of the very real ill that these people evince—prejudice—so Wallace’s judgments rarely feel unfair. “When you tell white people that something is racist,” he thinks, “they hold it up to the light and try to discern if you are telling the truth.” Rather than interrogate themselves, “they always trust their own judgment.” Wallace comes to implicate himself in this theme. He often acknowledges that his own pain has blinded rather than attuned him to the experiences of his peers, and some of the book’s most thrilling passages occur when he reckons with his instinct to underestimate the suffering of his friends—when he concedes that apparent privilege often coincides with unseen trauma, however minor its magnitude. He scolds himself for dismissing a kind, Chinese-American colleague—the daughter of a cardiologist and a retired techie—who, Wallace at first assumes, could not possibly resent their lab for the same reasons that he does. Listening to a friend lament his partner’s infidelity, Wallace interjects, “Oh, stop playing at somber.” His unspoken thoughts extend the interruption: “Stop playing at morose, at mystery, as if you aren’t living every moment of your life on the surface or just below it.”