...brilliantly terrifying ... With Loner, Teddy Wayne has written a masterclass on the privilege found in white male narcissism. David’s story is difficult to read, but it’s necessary.
Loner moves ahead to its climax (and a superbly executed plot twist) with the sickening momentum of a horror movie. Though the study of a brainy, insecure Harvard kid has parallels to the movie The Social Network, Mr. Wayne is working with far darker material. This is Neil LaBute territory, full of misogyny, compulsion and duplicity.
Wayne’s writing is spiky and electric, and combined with his use of the collective 'we' (at least in the initial chapter), it reminded me of the early work of Jeffrey Eugenides ... if the setup is promising, the discomfort this reader experienced while reading Loner was manifold. For one thing, the dichotomy Wayne establishes between the digestion-addled, potato-shaped, hopelessly provincial and embarrassingly ambitious Jew versus the effortlessly soignée and sophisticated WASP seems, at this point in American history, not only a cliché but an anachronism .. as Loner barrels toward its shocking and not entirely plausible conclusion, the reader may begin to wonder what value there is in being inside the mind of the novel’s deceitful and deranged antihero.
Wayne has a remarkable control of voice...In Loner, the fullness of David’s character, and the sympathy the reader feels for a lonely boy and the frightful sense of entitlement of the middling white male, are apparent in his voice ... Loner is a fast-moving book that draws on strong character development and voice to compel the reader forward. Wayne’s skillful control of the text keeps the reader interested even as his protagonist grows more unlikable. Loner offers an enticing, if also distressing, examination of white male privilege and its resulting catastrophes.
Because David’s devolvement is subtle enough, part of the pleasure of Loner is that the reader, seeing what David can’t, is still privy to his skewed innermost thoughts as his actions and motivations get violent and criminal... [Wayne] writes with sly grace about the seemingly unsympathetic plight of being a white American man, albeit by using ironic extremes rather than domestic realism.
Loner begins as a sharply observed novel of manners, academic posturing and social distinctions on campus today. But it soon mutates into a classic tale of obsession. The overall effect is a bit jumbled. As a reader, I felt as though I'd been shoved off a college orientation tour straight into an advanced abnormal psych seminar. But if you don't mind the switch in style, Loner ultimately becomes a powerful and even a somewhat touching suspense story.
Wayne has created a uniquely terrifying and compelling protagonist for such a funny book ... the best second-person novel I’ve read since Sam Lipsyte’s Home Land ... Loner is a great, lethal little book that, if justice prevails, will find its way outside of Harvard Square.
There is comic brio, but also an insider's precision, to Wayne's depiction of an institution riddled with entitlement, academic pretense and social traps, like a sophisticated version of the old children's game Chutes and Ladders. By making David his narrator, Wayne, a New York Times columnist and the author of two previous novels, implicates us in his machinations.
In a culture of literary fiction that still widely celebrates that axiom of the creative writing workshop — 'find your voice' — Wayne’s virtuosity lies in an ability to convey his own distinctive ironic sensibility and ethos entirely through the voices of others ... Teddy Wayne’s work is always highly attuned to the mood and fixations of the contemporary moment, and Loner is a campus novel for our times, reflecting distinctly modern anxieties about the state of American higher education ... What had begun as a witty comedy of campus manners becomes a study in pathological narcissism and sexual aggression. The novel’s brilliance lies in the way Wayne toys with the reader’s sympathies while allowing his narrator to pursue his dreadful end ... Unfortunately, the book’s literary playfulness might leave the impression that Loner is just playing with rape, and some readers will doubtless think that Wayne should find a new toy. At the same time however, the novel’s formal virtuosity — the qualities responsible for the gap between author and narrator — are also the essence of Wayne’s prowess. Like its narrator, Loner is one prickly piece of work, but the genius is hard to miss.
Some details about the novel’s characters are unrealistic — like the idea that someone like Veronica would be well-versed in feminist theory — or underdeveloped — like David’s preoccupation with visualizing words backward. But Wayne successfully keeps the reader focused on David and his goal, even as his methods become more and more disturbing.
By establishing David as a psychopath and giving him the markings of a killer, Teddy Wayne elevates (or lowers) the crime of rape to murder’s level. By the end, David’s actions seem no less dreadful for their lack of fatality ... Loner highlights the outsize influence of class on justice, but it’s also a chilling commentary on gender politics ... Teddy Wayne holds up the Ivy White Male card as the ultimate trump. He means to slap awake a country that glorifies wealth; deifies men; objectifies women; and treats victims of sexual assault like sluts, kooks, and gold-diggers. The story barely qualifies as fiction, and it arrives on our shelves just in time.
