Termite art

Teddy Wayne's graceful study of male literary ambition shouldn't go unnoticed.

Good morning, happy final week of a hellish year, and welcome back to Writing About Reading.

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I’m currently reading: Grievous by H.S. Cross (English boarding school novel, her sequel to Wilberforce); The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (short stories) by Denis Johnson; and The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt (continuing a recent Western kick).

What are you reading?

I started this newsletter in October, and have written more about old books than new, including titles published in 1952 (The Natural), 1962 (The Man in the High Castle), 1968 (The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.), and 1973 (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72).

This week, I want to turn the spotlight on a novel published in February 2020 that, either due to timing (published just before the pandemic changed everything), or size (slim), or subject matter (two white men in graduate school for fiction writing, not very “of the moment” right now in the culture), got a little bit overlooked by the literati, in my view.

The setup of Teddy Wayne’s novel Apartment is deceptively simple: two men meet in a Columbia MFA program in 1996 and become friends. They are basically the book’s only characters. I can imagine this novel as a very tight play.

Their friendship is imbalanced from the start. The narrator (who remains unnamed) comes from money and lives in a rent-controlled two-bedroom apartment owned by his great aunt; his father pays his Columbia tuition. Billy, on the other hand, comes from a small town in rural Illinois, went to community college, and hasn’t heard from his father in five years. He has taken out multiple student loans and works as a bartender at an East Village dive bar outside of class to earn money for food. The narrator has never had a job that involved a cash register, and, watching Billy at the bar, is impressed with “how dexterously he operated it.”

The narrator is the pursuer in the friendship, Billy the pursued. Billy is the better writer, the manlier man, effortlessly cooler, and humble. The narrator is an insecure misanthrope, in keeping with Teddy Wayne’s zone of interest. (His best-known novel is Loner.) The narrator sweats through his shirt from social anxiety during drinks with classmates, and slips out in embarrassment.

Wayne’s writing is mostly subtle. You get the sense of exactly who the two men are almost immediately, from just a handful of clues. When Billy shows the narrator where he sleeps, on an air mattress on the floor in the storage basement of the bar where he works, Wayne doesn’t overdo the description to make it sound filthy or shocking. He just writes that the space had “a single bulb” and “the moldy odor of a locker room.” The narrator can only remark: “Nice little setup.”

Billy showers in the gym at school, and does his writing by hand in a notebook, then types it up in the computer lab at school. The narrator writes at a beautiful, leather-topped desk in his great aunt’s apartment. (Because it’s 1996, the story is unfettered by the internet.) An exchange about the desk says it all. Billy asks, “You must feel like a serious writer when you’re at it,” and he means it genuinely, not as a snide comment. The narrator replies that it actually makes him feel like a fraud. (Kirkus, in its review of Apartment, called it a “near-anthropological study of male insecurity,” which is dead-on; I’d add that the novel could have been titled Envy.)

The narrator constantly tells Billy anecdotes about the achievements of Michael Chabon, Jeffrey Eugenides, Rick Moody, and David Foster Wallace. At a party for a literary magazine, the narrator excitedly points out Mary Gaitskill, Elizabeth Wurtzel, and Noah Baumbach. Billy has never heard of any of them. “Infinite Jest had come out that spring, and if you followed the publishing world at all, it was hard to miss,” the narrator tells us; he spends more time dreaming of joining the ranks of great writers than actually writing. Billy says he’s only getting a master’s degree so that he can become a professor; he’s even contemplating transferring from Columbia to a cheaper school in the city that will give him more tuition help.

The narrator invites Billy to move in with him. (“He would always have to struggle to stay financially afloat… 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.”) Yes, the narrator has a spare bedroom, but he also fools himself that he might be able to absorb some of Billy’s talent and winning personality through proximity. He wants to become Billy; at one point, sitting in a steam room, he imagines wearing Billy’s body “like an exoskeleton, moving through the world in his impervious chassis.”

There’s not much more to tell, plot-wise, other than to say the friendship (obviously) goes very wrong. The climax is shocking but also feels plausible, and had shades of one of my favorite novels ever, Tobias Wolff’s Old School. There is no accounting for what a jealous aspiring writer will do.

There’s a term the narrator uses four times in the book to describe Billy’s novel in progress, which he’s so impressed with: termite art. It comes from a famous essay by the film critic Manny Farber that ran in Film Culture magazine in 1962. (You can read the whole thing here.) The narrator’s summation of the concept: “a small-canvas work that methodically eats at its own borders, saying more in its straitjacketed space than a bloated saga ever could with its boldfaced Important Themes.”

Farber’s original essay was actually focused on the concept in movies, and he cites John Wayne’s performance in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962) as an example: “Wayne is the termite actor focusing only on a tiny present area, nibbling at it with engaging professionalism and a hipster sense of how to sit in a chair leaned against the wall, and eye a flogging overactor (Lee Marvin).” When I read this, I thought of Brad Pitt in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” I disliked the movie (it was so long and indulgent, and nothing happened until the final scene), but when I think of Pitt’s performance, I understand why he won the Oscar. He was perfectly understated opposite Leonardo DiCaprio’s manic role.

Farber does offer some examples of termite art outside of film, such as “the occasional newspaper column by a hard-work specialist caught up by an exciting event.”

Apartment itself is a form of termite art, even if Wayne might be not-so-humbly hoping to lead the reader to that very conclusion. With a simple, quiet setup, it nibbles at the edges to reveal what’s underneath.

And that’s enough to validate good art. To circle back to what I said earlier, I didn’t get the sense Apartment was a huge hit in the literary world. The headline that the New York Times used for its review of the book confirms my suspicion about why: “This Novel Is Set in a ‘90s M.F.A. Program. The Author Is Aware of Your Concerns.” The unsubtle message of the headline is: Another novel about ambitious young literary men? And indeed, in a year defined by social justice and Black Lives Matter—a year in which the biggest novels were The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi, Deacon King Kong by James McBride, and Homeland Elegies by Ayad Akhtar—a novel about two white men in a Columbia MFA program probably looks poorly timed.

But I would point to what the novelist Garth Greenwell wrote in his piece “Against ‘relevance’ in art” in Harper’s last month, and here’s just a taste, with the caveat that an attempt to summarize his whole piece with one chunk is probably unfair, so you should read the whole thing.

“I think our use of the word ‘relevant’ is distorting our appraisals of art… Anytime we praise the relevance of a particular novel, we are positing, at least implicitly, the irrelevance of other novels; and often enough we make this judgment explicit. We are tired, I sometimes hear my friends say, I sometimes hear myself say, of stories about straight, white, privileged men contemplating adultery; we are tired of stories about Americans abroad; we are tired of stories about middle-class malaise. […] Often these judgments are framed as jokes, though they are half in earnest. They make me laugh sometimes; they also make me worry… It is always ethically suspect to speak of any human experience as irrelevant to our common human experience; it is always, let me go further, an act of something like violence.”

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Thanks for reading with me, and I hope you’ll continue to join me in 2021. A preview of topics to come: Sally Rooney; Michel Houellebecq; Chinese sci-fi.

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