Apartment by Teddy Wayne
New York City is fast-paced and marked by a seemingly endless variety of people and circumstances, but if there is one thing predictable about life in the city it’s high rent. All city-dwellers have come to expect this, but the MFA students at Columbia are particularly aware of the inconvenience. Most are sequestered away in the cramped quarters of university housing where the buildings are barely holding together, but then there’s our narrator.
He’s a first year in Columbia’s MFA program with a dream of penning a legacy that will long outlive him, like so many of the others, but he has one major advantage: a rent-controlled apartment, courtesy of his great aunt.
Apartment (Bloomsbury) by award-winning author Teddy Wayne presents a quiet story of real life, but its true brilliance lies in the nuance of emotion that Wayne manages to capture. If you’ve ever taken a writing workshop, you’ll recognize the palpable feelings of anticipation, anxiety, hope and isolation that Wayne imprints on his characters; if you haven’t, you’ll know exactly what it feels like after reading this book. Apartment paints a picture of loneliness in a crowd and makes a compelling case for the physical need for love, even if it’s just friendship.
With his dad is footing the tuition bill and the rest of his living expenses, our narrator just needs to lay low enough to avoid suspicion from the management company that owns the apartment complex long enough to get the place legally transferred into his own name. From the looks of things, he’s got it all figured out, but as any MFA student worth his salt knows, the inner life of a character doesn’t always match what meets the eye.
Our narrator is desperately lonely until he meets Billy. Both Billy and our narrator are MFA students at Columbia, but the similarities stop there. While our narrator has been living in New York for nearly six years, Billy is fresh out of small-town Illinois, in desperate need of an affordable place to live. Luckily, that’s the one thing our narrator has to offer. The new living arrangement seems ideal at the outset, but our narrator quickly realizes he wants more than a roommate. Will mismatched intentions and jealous over talent destroy the chance at friendship? Join Wayne for his tale of loneliness, masculinity and friendship to find out.
Apartment is now available for purchase.
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