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Applying to college is the stuff of myth\u2014touring campus, imagining yourself lounging around in the \u00a0common room in a Notre Dame sweater and rugby socks, assuming your rightful place at your Dream School\/in the upper echelon of society\u2014but when you get there, one of the weird things is that your attention immediately shifts from, say, “Can I get into Harvard?” to “Oh God, I got into Harvard… How do I make it here?”<\/p>\n
Whether you got into Harvard, Princeton, Howard, UT, or \u00a0Colorado Mountain University (all top options), after you actually go off to college toting your LOTR<\/em> \u00a0duvet, panini maker, and the entirety of your parents’ hopes and dreams, your focus shifts from your high school \u00a0peers to the new student body, each of whom is as smart and rich as you, as deserving as you, and\u2014at least at the beginning\u2014as alone as you.<\/p>\n That’s the jumping-off point for Teddy Wayne’s<\/a> killer \u00a0new novel, Loner<\/a><\/em>. David Federman \u00a0is a socially awkward dude from New Jersey who got into Harvard, and is determined to reinvent himself as a successful ladies-man, academic standout, and general winner. From the start, things don’t go as planned: David’s \u00a0friendship prospects appear limited to a \u00a0crew of nerds \u00a0who call themselves the “Matthews Marauders”; his only romantic prospect is the ever-allergic, lactose-intolerant Sara; and he finds himself excluded from the elite clubs \u00a0within Harvard’s grounds. Not to be deterred, David fixates on the \u00a0sophisticated Manhattanite WASP, Veronica, \u00a0to whom the entire novel is unnervingly addressed. His strategies to get close to Veronica include a) offering to help her study (“I deleted your tenth-grade paragraph and began writing in Harvard-level prose”) and b) dating her roommate, Sara (“As I dozed off to the white noise machine, I stroked Sara’s arm, mentally elongating it until it reached your lithe proportions.”).<\/p>\n Uh, are you creeped out yet?<\/p>\n David’s enterprising nature starts out a little Gatsby-ish, but takes a turn for the Howard Roark-y when his social calculus \u00a0gets a little too intensive. He makes a study of Veronica, piecing together available clues (Facebook searches, snooping in her room, probing her class schedule) to form a picture of the girl she is, and the guy she needs (David, naturally). Everyone can relate to feeling like an Awkward Albert \u00a0at college, and David’s penchant for spelling words backwards (hence “LONER: A LEVON”) is cringeworthy, but it’s his certainty from his \u00a0place outside the social sphere that he is better than the social betas who populate his dorm and that he deserves the company of Veronica\u2014that he is even being used and abused by Veronica (“you”)\u2014that tips this novel into \u00a0a five-bell MRA alarm. Here he is picturing his manifest destiny:<\/p>\n “You’d stand by my side at stultifying faculty parties and jet around the world with me as I was crowned with laurels at academic conferences, joking with the awestruck attendees and proteges about how impenetrably dense my books where while shooting me a private look that said you did, of course, understand them (I had taught you so much), these are the self-effacing comments we must make so as not to appear full of ourselves, when can we get out of here and fuck in our hotel room?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It is a wild time to be on campus, with pained debates about the viability of trigger warnings and safe spaces<\/a>, \u00a0faculty arguing that college must push students to consider uncomfortable, challenging ideas, students demanding that colleges right the wrongs of the world beyond the Ivy, administrators struggling to address campus rape crises, mass shootings \u00a0taking over the news, and tomorrow’s Lena Dunhams making their way through the fountains of Oberlin<\/a> \u00a0in their underwear. College is challenging simply because it offers you the greatest opportunity of your life at the same time as it demonstrates to you exactly<\/em> how the modes of entitlement and privilege reproduce themselves. (Did you go to Harvard? Me either.)<\/p>\n David sounds at first like the awkward guy you might befriend, \u00a0forgiving him his tics to partake in his supply of Lactaid, but evolves into the guy you \u00a0develop an irrational fear of, worrying that any degree of friendliness might be misinterpreted as flirtation. As his project to win over \u00a0Veronica verges on terrifying, he becomes a study in the dangers of isolation, preconceptions, ambition, and male entitlement. The ending is a shocker, but there aren’t easy lessons from it.<\/p>\n Far from the dry guides to affirmative consent<\/a> and 101 PowerPoints on intersectionality, Loner<\/em> gives you a crash course in the forces at work on your campus\u2014I guarantee it will \u00a0stick with you days after finishing, and become a \u00a0thing everyone discusses over \u00a0their racially insensitive sushi<\/a> in the dining hall.<\/p>\n Loner<\/a> is \u00a0out now!<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Applying to college is the stuff of myth\u2014touring campus, imagining yourself lounging around in the \u00a0common room in a Notre Dame sweater and rugby socks, assuming your rightful place at your Dream School\/in the upper continue reading<\/span>