The Nice Man Principle reviewed

In his well-received third novel, 2016’s Loner, Teddy Wayne put readers contained in the thoughts of an ungainly male faculty scholar who develops a disturbing obsession with a feminine classmate. His 2020 follow-up, Condo, was a few shy aspiring author pushed to jealousy by his extra proficient good friend. Wayne is a bard of male failure, insecurity, and resentment; unsurprisingly, the protagonist of his compelling new novel, The Nice Man Principle, is just not, actually, an amazing man.

No, our antihero is somebody for whom life hasn’t precisely labored out. Paul is a crotchety author with no fame to talk of and few worldly markers of prosperity. He spends his time hovering on the margins of a Brooklyn bourgeoisie personified by his extra profitable friends. His day job, as an adjunct at an area faculty, has just lately been topic to a humiliating demotion. He can now not afford his hire in South Slope, a neighborhood he selected to be able to be near his preteen daughter, Mabel. He's touchingly determined for her approval, but she prefers to spend her time together with his ex-wife and her new husband at their costly brownstone within the extra modern Park Slope.

A bane of dinner events, Paul is a pedant and a little bit of a prig. His tactless remarks suck the air out of conversations, and his tendency to launch into left-wing political rants alienates even his liberal acquaintances. He’s a proud technophobe engaged on a dyspeptic e-book, The Luddite Manifesto, that he believes is not going to solely make his fame however rally readers towards what he sees because the dumbed-down tradition and smartphone-driven ADHD of Trump-era America. In all places he sees barbarians on the gate. The school the place he teaches a freshman comp course forces him to assign a studying curriculum of BuzzFeed-style private essays — “I Broke Up with My Poisonous Boyfriend and It Was the Finest Factor I Ever Did,” “My Household Bodyshamed Me at Thanksgiving. I Had the PERFECT Response” — so asinine that they insult even his crushingly apathetic college students.

In the meantime, Paul retains tumbling down a gap. He loses his medical insurance; his daughter grows distant; he places foot in mouth at each conceivable alternative. To save cash, he strikes into his mom’s condo within the Bronx, the place he's disturbed to study that she’s develop into a loyal viewer of an unnamed right-wing cable community the “malevolent twaddle” of which he considers a poison within the American bloodstream. The extra humiliations Paul suffers, the extra the world makes him really feel insignificant, the extra he convinces himself that society is diseased and he alone possesses the treatment. In his screeds about pill computer systems and clickbait and declining consideration spans, Paul is basically raging at his worry that his daughter, his “little dumpling,” will outgrow her innocence and, in flip, her lame father. However he’s not introspective sufficient to comprehend that.

Regardless of his greatest efforts, Paul additionally turns into extra entangled with the shallow, tech-saturated tradition he loathes. He turns into hooked on commenting on a liberal information website, hungry for the dopamine rushes he will get when different posters like his feedback. He develops an Adderall behavior. Determined for revenue, he begins driving at evening for an Uber-style ride-hailing app. At some point, he picks up a feminine passenger who seems to be a producer on the right-wing cable community. In a manipulative effort to get nearer to the supply of his hatred, he begins relationship her. Now, now we have one thing like a Travis Bickle for the 2010s — cruising the streets, ranting about society’s pathologies, fixated on the concept with one large, harmful, attention-seeking act he can save the world and himself.

Wayne is a gifted author with a expertise for deft sketching. A match, prosperous Park Slope father has “a Tom Cruisian compactness.” Paul’s aged mom lives in an condo constructing with “Nixon-era decor” and a “carpeted hallway that inexplicably smelled of roast beef.” Wayne can also be a canny mimic of the dialogue of the liberal chattering lessons, whose conversations are restricted to a few invariable subjects: actual property, the unnamed right-wing populist who has just lately assumed the Oval Workplace, and streaming tv.

Wayne isn’t fairly a satirist. I believe his mission is extra earnest than that. However his scenes of bourgeois socializing have their very own type of mercilessness: “The Instances gave it a blended evaluation,” a personality says, of a brand new present a few serial killer. “Is it truly good?”

One in every of Wayne’s different strengths is capturing thought on the web page — the methods during which we flatter ourselves, or overanalyze, or rationalize whilst we brush apart our information that we’re rationalizing. “Overlook all of them,” Paul displays. “He was a author, a lone wolf, no conforming institutionalist or timid firm man. He wasn’t made to function of their exploitative programs. His wits, and The Luddite Manifesto, would save him.”

The novel’s plotting is tight, meticulous, even perhaps barely too neat, and there are some components, notably the subplot about Paul’s relationship with the cable information producer, the place Wayne barely stretched my suspension of disbelief, although hardly sufficient to have an effect on my enjoyment of the e-book. The Nice Man Principle, like Wayne’s different work, has a terse, cumulative tempo. Regardless of the emphasis on interiority, and the final mundanity of our protagonist’s life, issues transfer rapidly. The reader bounces between the brisk chapters, typically as quick as a paragraph, propelled alongside by the suspicion that with somebody as risky and pissed off as Paul, an eruption should absolutely be coming.

J. Oliver Conroy's writing has been printed within the Guardian, New York journal, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and different publications.