His entry begins:I've just reread the late William Goldman's two screenwriting memoirs, Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I Tell? Both are brisk, entertaining, incisive looks at screenwriting, the movie business, and the characters (real and fictional) Goldman dealt with over his long career. Goldman's pleasure in storytelling is evident on the page as well as the screen; he loves a punchy, revealing anecdote. There are...[read on]About Apartment, from the publisher:
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.Learn more about the book and author at Teddy Wayne's website.
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 Page 69 Test: Kapitoil.
Writers Read: Teddy Wayne.
--Marshal Zeringue
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