Teddy Wayne

"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

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

I appreciate that the author didn't make this a typical story where you're meant to laugh at the person coming to another country and learning about it. There was sympathy and it was lovely and still funny and moving. But. The last line of the book seems to have turned everything backward, and I don't know what to make of it as it doesn't seem fit with the rest of the mood. It could either be brutally realistic and not giving me a happy ending, or... something else, I guess, but in my mind show more that's a very unhappy ending that undoes all the discovery the character had and reduces it to nothing more than a dream-like experience, soon to be forgotten. show less

I just read Loner for the third time because I'm teaching it as the opening novel in my graduate postmodern fiction class this semester at Ha***** University. Oh my. Postmodern indeed.

Loner tells the story, from a first-person perspective, of David Federman, a New Jersey boy and the son of two lawyers, who gets into Harvard. Despite his lack of intellectual passion, he has the brains to take on any academic challenge. David is also a nerd and social outcast of the first order who hopes to show more shake that tag, a goal he despairs of until he sets eyes on the beautiful Veronica Morgan Wells.

David's obsession with Veronica is framed in two peculiar ways. First, he addresses Veronica in second-person throughout the story, often fantasizing about what "you" were doing or thinking. Second, he compares his pursuit of Veronica to Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale in Moby-Dick (David and Veronica both attend a class on American literature titled "From Ahab to Prufrock").

For me, it is this repeated web of allusions to American literature that really makes the novel. David Federman may be thought of as a loner, but it turns out that being an obsessive loner is hardly an innovative thing to be. Teddy Wayne draws on not only Captain Ahab, but also Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby, Eliot's Prufrock, Faulkner's Quentin Compson, Charlotte Perkins Gilman's narrator from "The Yellow Wallpaper," and Dickinson's poetry, among many others, to make a case about an American aspiration to adulation that is corrupted by madness and self-destruction.

Another important piece of symbolism in the novel is David's habit of expressing words and sentences backwards. Wayne hints at the meaning of this habit by having the Harvard professor refer, in a lecture on Moby-Dick, to a quote from Blake's "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," in which the devil makes a remark about the fatality of human will - a desire that can be resisted, in this instance, was a weak desire in the first place, and so allowed itself to be overcome. Blake is drawing here on the Christian tradition that portrays the devil as being an expert on the Bible, but in a way that twists its meaning to his own ends, often the reverse of what was originally intended. David's reversal of words and sentences is the outward manifestation of both his - and American society's - tendency to take things that are positive (education, for example) and twist it until it becomes a monstrosity.

In addition, Blake's words also link into the novel's meditation on the connection between will and moral responsibility. Normally individuals are held responsible for their action, but Wayne complicates this by looking at the centrality of will in American literature and history - characters like Ahab believe they are pursuing their own will, but in fact they are really puppets of their own vanity, ego, and self-destructive impulses. Wayne extends this notion to American colonial politics through references to Manifest Destiny, as well as to philosophical ideas, such as the novel's epigraph from Schopenhauer: "Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants."

It is the mark of a great work of literature that rereading reveals new ideas and nuances, and this has certainly been my experience with Loner Wayne's style is that perfect mixture of readability and sophistication, and the plot unfolds with just the right balance of drama and realism. Loner is a superb meditation on the neoliberal demons that drive our modern society, and a powerful argument that self-awareness is not the solution to exorcising them. show less