THE BIG MAN THEORY, by Teddy Wayne
Paul, the protagonist of Teddy Wayne’s new novel, ‘The Great Man Theory’, is a mortified everyman who finds contemporary life unsatisfactory. He shuns screens and tries to maintain his ability to think deeply and persistently about the things that matter to him: the environment, politics, history and the fight against the tyranny of the ready-made products that are so popular today. determine much of life. In other words, he’s the kind of annoying guy you sometimes find in the world: overly serious, exhaustingly furious, and boring at parties.
I immediately loved him. Grumpy characters often make for interesting novels. Think of Saul Bellow’s splenetic heroes: Moses Herzog, Augie March, and Artur Sammler. Paul most resembles the first of those men, and “The Great Man Theory” itself resembles “Herzog” (1964), a grievance novel focused on various people and institutions in the protagonist’s life. Like Moses Herzog, Paul is hyper-literate and his mind is racing with irritation and youthful glee. His story has a mocking charm. Like Herzog, Paul experiences a series of semi-comic but escalating mishaps that become much less funny as the novel progresses.
‘The Great Man Theory’ begins with Paul’s demotion from senior lecturer to assistant instructor after eight years at a Manhattan university. “More work for less money?” Paul says as his department chair brings the news. “Sign me up!” Since tenured academia, with all its late-capitalist indignities, is one of the few avenues of “consistent” work for writers, it’s no wonder we’re now in the midst of a revival of what’s being “deputy enlightenment.” named. In this subset of bildungsroman (one of the first and best examples of which is Bernard Malamud’s ‘A New Life’), the cold realities of academic labor production thwart the ideals of the naive academic. But here Wayne adapts the genre: A veteran of academia, Paul is humiliated because his low expectations were still too high.
Broke and without subsidized health insurance, Paul gives up his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and goes to live with his mother in the Bronx. He rides ride shares to earn extra income, which means he needs a smartphone. He must also figure out how to remain a current and dutiful father to his daughter, Mabel, whom he shares with his ex-wife (now remarried to a terribly wealthy tech investor). All while working on a non-fiction book he calls “The Luddite Manifesto,” an examination of the ways technology has corrupted and ruined not just democracy, but the world.
Wayne treats the dissolution of Paul’s life with wry irony. When Paul goes to a friend’s dinner party and says something scathing about progressives protesting on the weekend (“It’s kind of like taking toothpicks to a tank fight. And then posting pictures of your toothpicks on Instagram”), the comedy is on. the fact that Paul is probably right, but he is too shortsighted, too bitter to see that a gathering of Park Slope academics is not the right place.
When he goes on a first date, Paul has a hard time not talk about ‘the president’, who is not mentioned by name, but is most certainly modeled on Trump. After his date asks if they shouldn’t mention the president’s name, Wayne lets us know how “unjust” Paul thinks this is: “Dodging the discussion about the cancer was exactly what the tumorous president and his cronies wanted. .’
Still Paul is capable of self-reflection. He is all too aware of the dangers of his writing and how it wrecked his marriage:
“It was that his experience of writing had become more rancid, the essays became polemical clubs instead of sophisticated investigative tools. …His overt curiosity, in his twenties and early thirties, had—she’d claimed—turned into a revolving, serrated straight-line that wouldn’t budge a personal smile. … Some women may be initially attracted to a petulant fool, who prepares herself to see a brooding charisma in any chronic discontent. But nobody liked being married to someone.”
The Core of “The Great Man Theory” are double conversion stories. Paul’s mother is gently shaken red by the right-wing media, a transformation he only perceives after he moves back in with her. Suddenly, his mother is dating a conservative widower and watching a show called “Mackey Live.” This conflict boils over after a politician is apparently killed at the behest of the president and the show’s host.
†She didn’t shoot her,” his mother argues, repeating the president’s words. “A madman did it.”
When Paul calls her stupid, his mother snaps:
“You’ve always looked down on me. Your father and I paid with your diploma. You think I didn’t want to go to college? I had to work from the moment I finished high school. So did your father. After he was almost killed in Korea. What have you been dealing with? Never had to serve, no Great Depression, no World War II, nothing. And all you do is wander.”
Parallel to his mother’s conversion is that of Paul. The smartphone that this alleged Luddite acquires to drive is a cursed object that ties him to the internet. But before long, he leaves long comments on articles and surfs the Internet late at night: the news no longer just enrages him; now he “licked his verbal chops at the opportunity to weigh with a clever knocked-down or persuasive analysis.”
The macabre transformation speeds up when he receives that most seductive dark blessing: betrothal. One “essayist” comment in particular caught on: “His phone overheated with notifications and had to turn them off. By that evening, it had taken pride of place as the site’s most-approved comment of the day, that designation itself sparking more approvals, with a satisfying 6.4K next door, its numerical popularity so great it required a letter of abbreviation.
It’s moments like these that Wayne turns the smug wound of today’s liberal into a funny social comedy that is, at best, a worthy follow-up to those Serio-comedy novels by Bellow.
The most convincing and interesting part of “The Great Man Theory” is the way it captures a disturbing transformation taking place in schools, homes, offices, comment sections and Twitter threads around the world. I don’t mean the insidious ascendancy of the alt-right or the manosphere. I mean the conversion of seemingly enlightened liberals and left-wing centrists into frantic paranoids plagued by a shadowy legion of bad actors.
Such people have what social progressives might consider to be the ‘right politics’. They believe in the welfare state and wealth redistribution and sometimes even abolition by the police. And yet, to watch or listen to it is to witness people deeply in the grips of a conspiracy theory. it’s everything Russia† And conspiracy† QAnon is scary, but Wayne manages to reveal that the left has his own room full of red rope. He captures the pitiful as well as the amusing and the painfully poignant nature of this transformation, how it can erode a person.
I wish I could end things here. But I have yet to say something about the ending of ‘The Great Man Theory’. Teddy Wayne’s previous book, “Apartment,” turned out at the last minute to be a melodrama work, adding a necessary degree of extremity to the seemingly mundane stakes of attempting to become a writer. The mundane and melodrama often make for excellent companions.
In the case of “The Great Man Theory,” the final turn to melodrama just feels contrived and false. It makes the novel less smart, less captivating, less human. Wayne had the opportunity to write a real novel about frustrated contemporary masculinity and the ways white liberal men are also corrupted by the internet and their lingering sense of entitlement. Instead, by the end of “The Great Man Theory,” readers will find that the author has been laughing at them and his characters the entire time. A frantic ending to an almost great but ultimately gross novel.
Brandon Taylor is the author of ‘Real Life’ and ‘Filthy Animals’.
THE BIG MAN THEORY, by Teddy Wayne | 303 pp. | Bloomsbury Publishing | $27