The Great Man Theory by Teddy Wayne

Published by Bloomsbury Publishing on July 12, 2022

Like Loner and Apartment, The Great Man Theory is about a man whose true nature is at odds with his self-image. Paul is a 46-year-old academic, an instructor (demoted from lecturer for budgetary reasons) at a private New York City college for rich kids who can’t get into NYU. Paul has never been able to make the jump to professor, largely because of his limited publication history. He teaches writing but his own obscure essays are rarely published, likely because few people would want to read them. That’s fine with Paul, because anything that appeals to the masses is too trendy or superficial for Paul’s refined sensibilities.

Paul prides himself on eschewing technology (his mobile phone isn’t a smart phone) and won’t let his daughter Mabel watch significant amounts of television or have a phone with a screen. Paul is writing a book, The Luddite Manifesto, about the negative impact of social media and digital communications on attention spans, civility, and intellect. He has a publishing contract with an academic publisher and hopes the book will put him on track to a better academic job.

To make ends meet until he can conjure the life he believes he deserves, Paul becomes a rideshare driver, a gig that requires him to purchase a cheap smartphone. After an internal struggle, he begins leaving comments on a left-leaning news site, justifying his participation in social media as research for his book. To justify his thrill at receiving likes, he begins to post long comments as an antidote to the brief comments that (in his view) dumb down discourse. He gains a certain following, all while telling himself that he is elevating the digital form by posting meaningful analysis.

Paul’s is the story of a deteriorating life. He has a talent for shooting himself in the foot. Adderall doesn’t help him write as much as he thinks it does. To save money, he moves in with his mother but soon damages his relationship with her. He then damages his relationship with his daughter, his ex-wife, his employer, his colleagues, and his publisher.

Paul isn’t necessarily an evil person (or not until the novel ends), but he’s judgmental and a hypocrite. He fails to recognize any of those traits, in part because he is convinced that his critical judgments are reasonable and warranted. He bashes his students and the entire generation to which they belong because they don’t read printed books. He accuses them of expressing themselves in soundbites instead of nuanced thought. When a student writes a clever essay (in images and soundbites) that pushes back, Paul gives her an unwarranted D out of spite. The novel suggests that critics who view social media as dumbing down the populace should listen to the perspectives of bright young people who are no more dumbed down than boomers who grew up watching television.

Paul criticizes fellow liberals as elitist without bothering to learn about the work they are quietly doing to make society better. Yet Paul is not fundamentally different than his “elitist” friends; their tastes are the same and Paul’s meager resources stem from professional failure, not from sacrifice. But Paul doesn’t listen to his friends, his students, his daughter, or anyone else. He’s too busy being self-absorbed.

Paul isn’t necessarily creepy, but he gives off a creepiness vibe. It comes through when he insists on applying lotion to his daughter’s body, when he feels sad that, at age 11, she no longer wants to sleep in his bed, when he wants to sit in his parked car with a student to help her with an essay. The student — the one who got a D — may have misconstrued Paul’s intent (their conversation is ambiguous) or may be retaliating for a bad grade when she complains about harassment, but the truth is never entirely clear.

The Great Man Theory pokes fun at academia, bigots, Trump, and liberals who are too quick to judge others for not rigidly adhering to liberal doctrine. Wayne skewers schools that tell professors to avoid assigning books that have “trigger words,” schools that presume the fragility of marginalized students and fear disturbing them — as if education should never disturb students, never challenge students to understand the context in which a writer like Richard Wright or Mark Twain might have used a trigger word.

The novel lampoons the anti-feminist attitude of a woman who produces a show for a conservative media organization, a job she only has because of feminism. The producer is irate when Paul asks her to pay for one of the expensive dinners they’ve had. She earns several multiples of Paul’s income but wonders if she can date a man who isn’t capable of taking care of her. Paul dates her because he imagines he might get booked as a guest (with a host who might be modeled after Hannity) so he can offer unexpected but well-reasoned arguments from a liberal perspective. It isn’t much a plan but Paul isn’t good at distinguishing realistic from foolish plans.

As the story nears its resolution, it becomes clear that the ending will be dark. The nature of the darkness is foreshadowed a bit, but the details are surprising.

While the story is apparently meant to be dark comedy, it is more amusing than funny. Still, my interest in Paul’s self-destruction never wavered. The Great Man Theory isn’t a particularly insightful dissection of the idiotic culture wars that divide America, but Teddy Wayne does offer some insight into how people who take themselves too seriously — people who love their own minds but don’t bother to consider how their words and actions might affect others — can become the kind of people they claim to despise.

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Apartment by Teddy Wayne

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.

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Loner by Teddy Wayne

Published by Simon & Schuster on September 13, 2016

David Federman, a newly arrived freshman at Harvard, quickly finds a girlfriend who is perfect for him (i.e., she is capable of tolerating him) and just as quickly takes an interest in her beautiful roommate. David uses tactics to get close to Veronica that could be characterized as stalking, but it takes some time before Veronica even notices that he exists. When she does notice, she realizes that she can use him to write her papers. And so we have a classic relationship involving a user and a person who wants to be used (albeit in a different way), the kind of relationship that never ends well.

The story is told from David’s perspective, as if he were telling it to Veronica. It doesn’t build suspense in the traditional way, but it does create a sense of foreboding. Neither David, who mistreats his girlfriend and cares only about himself, nor Veronica, who seems to cultivate a tragic air when she’s not manipulating people, are particularly likable characters, so the reader might look forward to something bad happening to one (or preferably both) of them.

The story takes a smart twist near the end as David gains insight into Veronica and fails to gain insight into himself. The ending isn’t as powerful as I was expecting, but it is true to the story that precedes it. Sensitive readers might find it disturbing.

Teddy Wayne’s prose is graceful, but the novel’s real strength lies in its psychological exploration of David, a loner who is so stuck on himself that he has no clue how he is perceived by others. His sense of entitlement might make him a good fit for Harvard, but he is a misfit in any setting, socially awkward and completely invisible to the smug students who surround him. His story opens a window to other young men who derive a misplaced sense of entitlement from their intelligence while lacking the empathy and humility that would help them understand their true place in the world.

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