Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on February 25, 2020
Two young writing students have been accepted into Columbia’s MFA program. Billy, from a broken home in the Midwest, bartends evenings to pay his tuition. He lacks technical proficiency but he has a raw talent for telling honest stories and an ear for dialog. The novel’s narrator comes from a more privileged, East Coast background; his father is picking up his expenses. The narrator has a strong academic understanding of fiction, but he either lacks an artist’s soul or is incapable of allowing his soul to be reflected in his work. The reader will sense that the larger problem is the narrator’s lack of self-awareness. He is a lonely young man who does not understand the root of his loneliness.
The narrator is living illegally in his aunt’s rent-controlled apartment. After Billy is the only workshop student to praise the narrator’s work, the narrator offers to let Billy stay in the apartment’s second bedroom. Billy has been sleeping in the storage room in the bar that employs him and is grateful to have a nicer place to write. The two young men are quite different — Billy loves sports, the narrator loves Must See TV — but they strike up a strong friendship. The narrator spends most of his time with Billy, viewing him as the only real friend in a lonely life. When they party together, singing along to Oasis with others in a crowded bar, the narrator realizes “there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.” When he is sober, however, the future seems less promising.
The narrator observes Billy coming out of his shell over the course of the novel. While Billy is initially worried that he will appear as a hick to New Yorkers, his good looks and natural charm allow him to fit into any crowd, even when he despises most of the people he meets for their shallow pretentiousness. The narrator envies Billy because the narrator lacks the qualities that make Billy popular. Billy, in turn, resents the ease of the narrator’s life, his reliance on a father to pay expenses rather than doing “character building” labor to pay his own way. Billy has a midwestern tendency to judge anyone harshly who fails to meet his standards of authenticity.
When Billy and the narrator bring a pair of women to their apartment, they each take one to their respective bedrooms. For the narrator, the evening is unsatisfying. Combined with other clues, that encounter leaves the impression that the narrator might be in the closet. The novel’s pivotal point occurs on the next occasion Billy and the narrator pick up two women. During a drunken moment that may or may not be accidental (the narrator’s ability to distinguish accident from intent might not be reliable), Billy forms the obvious impression that the narrator is sexually attracted to him. That moment dissolves the male bond, at least from Billy’s perspective, and causes the narrator pain that leads to the story’s climax.
Well, okay. I get it. The narrator views himself as “fundamentally defective” but lacks insight into the cause of his self-loathing. The Apartment allows the reader to feel smug for understanding the narrator better than the narrator understands himself. Beyond that, I’m not sure what the story is meant to make the reader feel. I felt little empathy for the narrator’s struggle toward self-awareness, a struggle that continues to the novel’s end, given that he seems determinedly obtuse. The only true insight he reaches is that he is a better technician than a storyteller, the same thing he was told by everyone but Billy in his workshops.
Billy is something of a midwestern stereotype, a polite homophobe with low expectations who rails against elitism but tries to be fundamentally decent in an “aw shucks” way. While the narrator will always grapple with loneliness (unless and until he comes to understand why he is lonely), people will always gravitate to Billy; his initial insecurity about living in New York is an anomaly. Yet it is difficult to square Billy’s personality with his ability to write stories that appeal to Columbia MFA students. “I can’t be friends with someone who might be gay” is an incongruous attitude for the kind of writer who would earn praise at Columbia.
The Apartment struck me as something that the novel’s narrator might write. It is technically proficient but it lacks emotional resonance. The two key characters come across as literary creations rather than actual people, and the climax (like their relationship as a whole) struck me as artificial. Teddy Wayne’s technical proficiency suffices to make the reading experience at least partially satisfying, but when I finish a book and think nothing more than “Well, okay, I get it,” I can’t give the book a heartfelt recommendation.
RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS