Teddy Wayne

David Federman went unnoticed in high school. Even his high grades were overlooked by all but his teachers. His friend group was, he felt, composed of the detritus of high school society and he longed to be noticed by the popular kids.

We were studious but not collectively brilliant enough to be nerds, nor sufficiently specialized to be geeks. We might have formed, in aggregate, one thin mustache and a downy archipelago of facial hair. We joked about sex with the vulgar fixation of virgins. show more We rarely associated outside of school and sheepishly nodded when passing in the halls, aware that each of us somehow reduced the standing of the other--that as a whole we were lesser than the sum of our parts.

Still, he gets into Harvard and arrives ready to start an entirely different life where he is finally appreciated and admired, only to find himself in the same social group as before. But on that first day he sees Veronica, a beautiful, wealthy girl from the privileged background of private New York schools and effortless social fluency. He is immediately smitten.

What follows is an upending of all the usual tropes of the literary college novel. We've all read plenty of books in which the awkward but good-natured guy faces a few hurdles, but eventually finds out who he really is and along the way wins the heart of the girl. This is not one of those books. We've all read the WMFuN,* in which the guy makes mistakes, but finds redemption, after an appropriate penance, with the more down-to-earth girl (and often gets to sleep with the object of his affection). This is certainly not one of those novels. Instead, Teddy Wayne takes us into the mind of someone we think we've all met before, whose intentions are familiar to us and shows us that we are very much mistaken.

Loner is fantastic. Wayne manages to create a brilliant and uncomfortable character study in the form of the college novel that is so immersive and insightful and off-putting. He's an excellent writer who is an even better observer of people's behavior and I look forward to reading more by him.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel. show less

"There is no good reason, at this stage of your life, to play it safe and hold back," she'd said. "This is the time to experiment and make mistakes and open yourself up to brutally honest feedback. That's the only way to grow as an artist. Fail again, fail better."

The narrator of Apartment is lucky enough to not only have a father paying his tuition and living costs, while he's attending the Colombia MFA program, but he's living in his great-aunt's apartment, a rent-controlled two bedroom, a show more much nicer living situation than that of most of the other graduate students. He's always been a little awkward around other people, slow to get to know people, resigned to having a few acquaintances as his only connections.

He's been working on a novel, but isn't prepared for the harsh reaction he receives from his peers. Only Billy, a Midwestern transplant a little overwhelmed by the city, has anything positive to say. Soon after meeting him, and on a whim, the narrator offers the empty second bedroom in his apartment to Billy.

This is a novel about the difficulty of making a connection, about how difficult male friendship can be and, especially, a novel about how one man can't manage to get past his own self-consciousness, despite his best efforts. It turns out that I like novels about people messing up their own lives, even when the protagonist is a white guy. While this does veer towards WMFuN* territory, it never quite manages to become one, despite the narrator's best efforts. There's a melancholy air to this story that I found utterly attractive. And when things careen past the merely uncomfortable, Wayne made the various things happening make sense and inevitable, given what had happened before. This is a really well done and beautifully written novel and I'm so glad to have found it.

* White Male Fuck-up Novel, truly a well established genre. show less

Very well written and disturbing. You think the tension is going to be released and get so dark into touching the farcical, like a Hollywood movie. But what makes it so jarring is how realistic it ends up being. That adult worldview, while reading about well developed characters in their teen years, makes it very dismal and hard-headed, which punches harder than you espect.

Written from the point of view of an 11-year-old pop star managed by his mother, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine creates a unique niche for itself among other works of literary fiction. In some ways, Jonny is oddly adult: he has a professional attitude about his work (he treats it like work), and he understands more about music and the music industry than most adults, let alone most tweens. However, some things go completely over his head, and often the way he talks/thinks is obviously show more shaped by industry practicalities that he has absorbed from his mother/manager (who he calls Jane, not Mom) and others around him. Both his bodyguard, Walter, and his tutor, Nadine, are occasionally baffled or taken aback by his parroting, and they gently probe for his real thoughts and feelings, but his experience is divorced from a "normal" context. He is so unlike most 11-year-old boys that he comes across as strange and fake to others, though he is authentic to himself. Of course, the real issue is why Americans are so obsessed with the entertainment industry - not just the entertainment itself, but the real people involved in it - and pay no attention to real news.

Quotes:

You smile, but you don't laugh. Like a song you hum along with but don't tap your feet to. (39)

That's how you know who's more famous, whichever one of you is more excited to meet the other. (39)

It's that they think they love me. But you can only love someone for real who loves you back. They're IN love with me. You can do that for someone who doesn't even know your name. (59)

"Disavowing your hipsterness is the surest sign that you are a hipster." (83)

"All that matters is what you are now."
That wasn't true, because you always knew who you were before and you kept thinking of yourself like that even if no one else did..." (210)

Me, I needed dialogue coaching and an allied interviewer and a receptive crowd, and even if I won them over the last twenty times in a row, I wasn't sure I could do it on the twenty-first. (250)

We didn't need to say any more. Musicians are like athletes. They all know who the MVP is. (251) show less