Apartment : a novel

One of Vogue's 22 Books to Read This Winter Draftsmanlike precision...it leaves one feeling vaguely ill, in the best way possible. A near-anthropological study of male insecurity. - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) From the award-winning author of Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, a powerful novel about loneliness and friendship, gender and sexuality, and the political schisms that dominate our times. In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan. The narrator s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling fundamentally defective. But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them. The rare page-turner that always maintains its dignity as a moving portrait of loneliness and longing. Joshua Ferris, author of Then We Came to the End