Apartment

October 28, 2019
Wayne’s subtle, fascinating novel (after Loner) is set in the world of an MFA creative writing program at Columbia in 1996. The anxious, unnamed narrator didn’t make any friends at New York University as an undergraduate, and considers it equally unlikely that he will find any among the ambitious, self-assured students in his current classes. He’s delighted when charismatic Midwestern scholarship student Billy defends the first story the narrator presents against the attacks of the class, and invites Billy, who has been living in the basement of the bar where he works, to share the two-bedroom apartment the narrator’s great-aunt has been allowing him to live in rent-free. Billy offers to clean the apartment and cook dinners in exchange for the room. At first, the narrator revels in the arrangement, but the balance of power between the two shifts gradually but irrevocably over the months that follow. The narrator, inclined to “airbrush out unpalatable blemishes here and there” in his past and his emotional life, notices and then immediately represses things like the way “the thin ribbed cotton of his white tank top hugged body like a second skin.” Wayne keeps his attention firmly on the small details that define the evolving relationship as Billy loses interest in the narrator. Wayne excels at creating a narrator both observant of his surroundings and deluded about his own feelings. Underneath the straightforward story, readers will find a careful meditation on class and power. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic.

Starred review from December 1, 2019
Wayne's latest foray into the dark minds of lonely young men follows the rise and fall of a friendship between two aspiring fiction writers on opposite sides of a vast cultural divide. In 1996, our unnamed protagonist is living a cushy New York City life: He's a first-year student in Columbia's MFA program in fiction (the exorbitant bill footed by his father) who's illegally subletting his great-aunt's rent-controlled East Village apartment (for which his father also foots the bill). And it is in this state--acutely aware of his unearned advantages, questioning his literary potential, and deeply alone--that he meets Billy. Billy is an anomaly in the program: a community college grad from small-town Illinois, staggeringly talented, and very broke. But shared unease is as strong a foundation for friendship as any, and soon, our protagonist invites Billy to take over his spare room, a mutually beneficial if precarious arrangement. They are the very clear products of two different Americas, one the paragon of working-class hardscrabble masculinity, the other an exemplar of the emasculating properties of parental wealth--mirror images, each in possession of what the other lacks. "He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat," our protagonist realizes, "and I would always be fine, all because my father was a professional and his was a layabout. I had an abundance of resources; here was a concrete means for me to share it." And he means it, when he thinks it, and for a while, the affection between them is enough to (mostly) paper over the awkward imbalance of the setup. Wayne (Loner, 2016) captures the nuances of this dynamic--a musky cocktail of intimacy and rage and unspoken mutual resentment--with draftsmanlike precision, and when the breaking point comes, as, of course, it does, it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible. A near-anthropological study of male insecurity.

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December 1, 2019
An intimate friendship between two aspiring writers is tested by socioeconomic friction. It's the mid-1990s, and the unnamed narrator is flailing about in his MFA seminar. The only one who appreciates his work is Billy, a transplant from Illinois who describes himself as a classic rags-to-rags tale and sleeps in the storeroom of the bar where he works. They bond over whiskey and outsider status, and Billy soon moves into the narrator's coveted, unauthorized sublet of a rent-controlled New York City apartment, taking the spare room in exchange for cooking and cleaning. Billy is the real deal, gifted with literary sensibilities and a work ethic that our narrator, for all of his parents' wealth, cannot sustain. But he's also rough around the edges, jaded by a hard past and unsure what to make of the narrator's curious benevolence. Is it loneliness? Class guilt? Or a more complicated sort of longing? As he did in Loner (2016), Wayne emphasizes the gap between social isolation and an intense internal life, and uses the contrast to explore contemporary cultural anxieties in tenderly close focus.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)