Overview

"""At its finest, a worthy successor to those seriocomic novels of Bellow."" -Brandon Taylor, The New York Times Book Review Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Esquire, LitHub, Publisher's Lunch, Dandelion Chandelier, and Chicago Review of Books From acclaimed, Whiting Award-winning author Teddy Wayne, the hilarious, incisive, yet deeply poignant story of a liberal armchair-revolutionary desperate to save America from itself. Paul is a recently demoted adjunct instructor of freshman comp, a divorced but doting Brooklyn father, and a self-desc-ribed ""curmudgeonly crank"" cataloging his resentment of the priorities of modern life in a book called The Luddite Manifesto. Outraged by the authoritarian creeps ruining the country, he is determined to better the future for his young daughter, one aggrieved lecture at a time. Shockingly, others aren't very receptive to Paul's scoldings. His child grows distant, preferring superficial entertainment to her father's terrarium and anti-technological tutelage. His careerist students are less interested than ever in what he has to say, and his last remaining friends appear ready to ditch him. To make up for lost income, he moonlights as a ride-share driver and moves in with his elderly mother, whose third-act changes confound and upset him. As one indignity follows the next, and Paul's disaffection with his circumstances and society mounts, he concocts a dramatic plan to right the world's wrongs and give himself a more significant place in it. Dyspeptically funny, bubbling over with insights into America's cultural landscape and a certain type of cast-aside man who wants to rectify it, The Great Man Theory is the work of a brilliant, original writer at the height of his powers."

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9781635578720

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Reviews

Darkly comic and emotionally intelligent . . . Wayne looks at it all--masculinity, literary ambition, our decade of free trade and liberalism triumphant--and finds the rot underneath. --The Boston Globe on APARTMENT Wayne's attention to detail and language serves almost as a surgeon's scalpel, gently peeling back layered topics--friendship, class, sexuality--to reveal an engrossing survey of male insecurity and frailty . . . Carefully written and evocative with an airtight plot. --Salon on APARTMENT There's perhaps no living writer better at chronicling the most crucial emotional flash points of the young modern male than Teddy Wayne. --The A.V. Club A taut story that the author bravely sees through to its inevitable end. --The New Republic on APARTMENT

A picture of the world as we know it, from the point of view of a funny, aggravating man, The Great Man Theory is an original and discomfiting portrait of the individual in the collective, as he tries to make his mark. --Literary Hub's Most Anticipated List of the Year There's perhaps no living writer better at chronicling the most crucial emotional flash points of the young modern male than Teddy Wayne. --The A.V. Club [A]n exquisite balancing act between the farcical and the devastatingly sad. --Kirkus Reviews Darkly comic and emotionally intelligent . . . Wayne looks at it all--masculinity, literary ambition, our decade of free trade and liberalism triumphant--and finds the rot underneath. --The Boston Globe on APARTMENT Wayne's attention to detail and language serves almost as a surgeon's scalpel, gently peeling back layered topics--friendship, class, sexuality--to reveal an engrossing survey of male insecurity and frailty . . . Carefully written and evocative with an airtight plot. --Salon on APARTMENT A taut story that the author bravely sees through to its inevitable end. --The New Republic on APARTMENT

Author Information

Teddy Wayne is the author of Apartment, Loner, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine, and Kapitoil. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers' Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, the PEN/Bingham Prize, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. A former columnist for the New York Times and McSweeney's and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has taught at Columbia University and Washington University in St. Louis.

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