“I always felt the keenest pangs of nostalgia for pasts not my own… as if those experiences were truer than my own.”
Apartment is the fourth novel from Teddy Wayne, a brief work of fiction at just over 200 pages. The premise: Wayne’s unnamed narrator has just started the MFA program at Columbia. He illegally sublets his great aunt’s apartment, with the bulk of his expenses funded by his father, not unaware of the advantages his middle-class standing allows him. A self-proclaimed outsider, he surprisingly finds himself forming a fast friendship with Billy, a classmate who shows him the type of attention he has rarely received in his life. Billy was raised in the midwest and attended community college with virtually no formal training in writing or literature; yet his innate talent is leaps and bounds beyond that of anyone else in the MFA program. Nearly strangers still, the narrator offers Billy a place to live rent-free, as a roommate, when he realizes Billy might otherwise be forced to leave the program. As their unexpected relationship develops, however, it becomes apparent how different these two truly are.
Wayne’s narrative is quite interior, yet peculiar to the point that the reader almost feels removed from this nameless man. In fact, his lack of a name is surely no oversight in the context of this story. Wayne builds an authentic setting of 1996-1997 New York City, punctuated by dry wit and references that immediately center the reader in this place and time. (Relaxed-fit Gap jeans and Leonardo DiCaprio anyone?) The narrator’s loneliness is so pointed it nearly feels that he has difficulty inhabiting his own body. While he is aware of this loneliness, how he avoids and withdraws from the world around him, this understanding also expands as events unfold.
At the core of Apartment is a unique examination of male friendship, male identity. Wayne deftly chronicles the devolution of a friendship, slowly unwinding, thread by uncomfortable thread. As the narrator experiences flashes of insight into himself, Billy responds by retracting, and these differences grow increasingly impossible to reconcile. As time passes, the narrator spirals, grasping for a connection he never imagined wanting to begin with, but is now unwilling to lose. Wayne also astutely explores how one decision can alter the course of a life, triggering a domino effect –how one may look back in hindsight and feel regret for decisions made, only after learning of the bitter outcome.
If you enjoy character-driven novels, you will likely appreciate Wayne’s examination of friendships, class, power, gender, and sexuality here. More than just the simple storyline posed at the outset, Apartment delves into these deeper constructs through the lens of mid-late ‘90s New York in a fresh, biting way. A bit unconventional, this is the type of book that wasn’t begging me to pick it up, but did not easily allow me to put it down once I started.
Apartment is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers as of February 25th 2020. Many thanks to Bloomsbury Publishing for providing this finished copy. All thoughts and opinions expressed here are entirely my own.
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A regular contributor to the New York Times, The New Yorker, and McSweeney’s, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently adapting Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine into a series for HBO and MGM Television. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife, the writer Kate Greathead, and their children.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom—rent-free—to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.
The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into a friendship he’s never had over a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.
