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In that first class, the narrator’s one defender is Billy, a young scholarship student from Illinois who shows great literary promise despite never having heard of David Foster Wallace, whose “Infinite Jest” has just been published. (“He writes pretty avant-garde stuff,” the narrator helpfully explains to his new friend. “He’s from Illinois, actually. … You’d like him.”) Awkward and uncomfortable in his surroundings despite his upper-middle-class Northeast pedigree, the narrator latches onto Billy as not just a fellow outsider, but a paragon of masculine authenticity. When he finds out Billy is sleeping in a basement storage room beneath an East Village dive bar, he offers to take him in for free at the rent-controlled apartment he’s already illegally subletting from his great-aunt. Billy insists on cooking and cleaning to earn his keep, in addition to fulfilling his unofficial role as the narrator’s diligent editor, transforming one of his workshop-maligned stories into a piece worthy of acceptance by a small literary magazine.
There’s never any doubt, of course, that the equilibrium of this arrangement will not hold, but Wayne, in the terrible-roommates tradition of Sam Shepard and Miranda July, rigorously draws out their dance of attraction and repulsion. Will they kill each other? Sleep together? Or just make passive-aggressive comments about each other’s writing? In a sequence that encapsulates the book’s easy charm, the narrator takes Billy to Chumley’s, the past-its-prime West Village literary bar, hoping that some of the Hemingway and Fitzgerald magic will rub off on them. Instead, since it’s 1996, they decamp with two female British tourists to an N.Y.U. bar where they all sing along to “Don’t Look Back in Anger” and make pained jokes about the lack of irony in Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” Billy effortlessly beds the woman he brings home, while the narrator finds himself unable to perform after some awkward groping with his own date.
Though class and sensibility play a role in their tension, the real problems between the roommates pivot on questions of gender and sexuality, questions to which I found Wayne’s approach at once overly cagey and too on-the-nose. Billy is cruelly dismissive of a colleague’s gender reassignment surgery (“C’mon”), and visibly perturbed by the gay scene on Christopher Street. In a steam room with Billy, the narrator conjures a “brief, less gruesome” vision of that infamous moment in “The Silence of the Lambs,” in which he “somehow wore Billy’s body like an exoskeleton, moving through the world in his impervious chassis.” He visits a urologist and in the waiting room contemplates a new father as he “frowned his way through the checklists and questions he never thought he’d have to answer — questions he’d never even thought of,” and wonders how his own distant father felt in that position. He has two different emotionally charged encounters with people who are missing limbs. At one point, an obnoxious professor invokes Jake’s oblique but oft-cited war wound in “The Sun Also Rises.” And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
As it did for the narrator in the opening workshop, Wayne’s choices here “work” in the sense that we believe his narrator would, were he writing the novelization of his life, handle his discomfort with his body and feelings with these kinds of hints and dodgy revelations. But at the same time — and this is true when it happens in a workshop, too — it feels a little cheap to turn the central character’s genuinely poignant longing and trauma into a scavenger hunt. Relatedly, as in Wayne’s previous book, the campus novel “Loner,” I couldn’t help feeling that the busyness and extremity of the plot’s denouement undercut the author’s otherwise humane sensibility. In other words: Just because he told me he was going to flinch doesn’t mean I wasn’t disappointed when he did.
