Deadly Male Ambition

Teddy Wayne's 'The Au Pair' and the dilemma of disappointed men

Jacques-Louis David, The Coronation of Napoleon, 1805-1807

For the last ten years of his literary output, Teddy Wayne has grappled with the question of what is to be done about men these days, and what is their place in society? It was also almost exactly a decade ago that I first learned of Teddy Wayne. It was at the Brooklyn Book Festival in the early fall of 2016, where he was on a panel entitled “Youth In Revolt.” His novel Loner had just been published, and following the panel, I bought a copy. Over the years, I’ve re-read it many times, and it’s a book that continues to haunt me.

Wayne is a prolific novelist who has published seven books, though I count Loner (his third novel) to be the start of his true oeuvre. There, we see the first incarnation of the Wayneian protagonist: a well-educated, straight, white American man of comfortable but modest origins who is struggling to realize his ambitions in a society that no longer predominantly caters to him. That drive, coupled with his need to disprove fears of his own timidity, often lead to disastrous outcomes, both for himself and those around him. In his other novels Apartment (2020), The Great Man Theory (2022), The Winner (2024), and now, The Au Pair (2026), Wayne continues to examine this archetype.

Born in 1979, Wayne falls just outside of the generational cohort of straight white American Millennial men that Jacob Savage argues in “The Lost Generation”¹ have been systematically excluded from elite cultural industries since the 2010s. Regardless, his writing is spiritually Millennial (for instance, Loner’s protagonist obsessively monitors his crush via Facebook, as opposed to, say, making her endless mixtapes). Wayne is fully aware that, as a straight white male novelist who writes about men like himself, he occupies a rare and precarious position in the contemporary literary landscape and strikes a fine balance between critiquing his protagonists’ relentless, egotistical pursuit of status and pointing out that the same society that expects these men to cede their privileges also hypocritically incentivizes them to do the opposite (only to scorn them as losers when they fail).

Savage’s essay was controversial and many attacked it as whining—from, no less, the most powerful, most represented, and most desired male demographic—about how it was some grave injustice that white men no longer enjoy the unfair advantages of their fathers. Wayne’s writings strongly suggest sympathy with those who criticized Savage’s piece. The Wayneian protagonist is a non-aspirational—even despicable—sort, from status-obsessed undergrads who stalk their college crush (David Federman in Loner), sad-sack MFA students who cling to a more attractive and talented friend (The Narrator in Apartment), self-aggrandizing blowhards who become rigidly ideological to mask their own career disappointments (Paul in The Great Man Theory), and working-class law school grads simmering with resentment towards the wealthy (Conor O’Toole in The Winner). Some anti-heroes become, intentionally or not, aspirational. But the Wayneian protagonist does not have the transgressive Übermenschness of a Patrick Bateman, the grand world-weariness of a Ferdinand Bardamu, or the rambunctious sexual neurosis of an Alexander Portnoy.

The Au Pair features the latest iteration of the Wayneian protagonist in Steven Hammer, a mid-40s washed-up novelist who nevertheless lives a good life as a de facto house-husband with his beautiful and successful investment banker wife, Lucy Myers, and their two young children in a Brooklyn Heights brownstone. When their live-in nanny passes away, Steven and Lucy hire Astrid Ødegaard, an au pair from Norway who also happens to be an aspiring writer. Steven and Astrid have an affair, and when Lucy suddenly dies under suspicious circumstances, Astrid is arrested for her murder.

One of the perverse pleasures of a Teddy Wayne novel is becoming privy to the thoughts of its pathetic protagonists. It’s what makes Wayne one of my favourite novelists. And Steven does not disappoint. He mopes around during his waking hours, devoting more effort to playing online Risk than teaching class or working on new writing. He occasionally voices ineffectual gripes about how nobody cares about his experiences and opinions anymore. And though he is a devoted father, he instantly abandons any sense of parental responsibility once he becomes obsessed with Astrid. A particularly low point comes when he and Astrid take his kids out to the park, and he ignores his 4-year old son Caleb’s complaints about not feeling well, just so Steven can continue to ogle Astrid in her short shorts. Caleb ends up having a febrile seizure. Don’t worry, Steven will do much worse.

Yet Wayne does not find sole fault with his protagonists. He realizes that, even if one were to find fault with Savage’s stats on the steep decline of straight white Millennial American men in elite cultural fields such as academia, Hollywood, and publishing, it is nevertheless true that during the era Savage references in his essay, those fields have been known to celebrate such declines. There’s a difference between wanting to abolish hierarchies and wanting to reorder them, and between the two, Wayne needles society into examining what it truly wants.

In The Au Pair, this societal contradiction can be seen in Steven and Lucy’s relationship. Since he barely makes any money as an adjunct professor of creative writing, he suggests to Lucy that he become full-time caretaker of their children and save on hiring a nanny. Lucy rejects the idea, though she does agree to give him a “stipend” so he can finish his latest novel. She married Steven Hammer the hotshot writer, not Steven Hammer the house husband.

Steven’s willingness to forego his career ambitions actually marks a major step forward for the Wayneian protagonist. For instance, David in Loner is a sociopath who becomes obsessed with a beautiful and wealthy classmate, Veronica Morgan-Wells, during his first semester at Harvard. His drive to succeed is fueled by delusions of grandeur and sexual entitlement; he goes to a professor’s office hours for the first time after he receives a top grade on his paper on Moby Dick (the “you” refers to Veronica, whom he constantly addresses via interior monologue):

Six weeks in and already the star pupil in the Harvard English department. My fancy prose style wasn’t going over [Professor] Samuelson’s head. It had finally found its proper audience, a potential mentor. I didn’t have to be a lawyer; I could be a professor of literature, wear one of those jackets with patched elbows, stroke my beard in an armchair and apply nuanced close readings without breaking a sweat. 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 were 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?

Given his condescension toward Veronica (despite her superior social class, which he covets), it’s hard to imagine David entertaining a future where he would subordinate his career to hers.

Steven’s comfort in taking a less traditionally masculine role is likewise a departure from the insecurities of the Narrator in Apartment. As a shy and physically unremarkable 20-something man attending the Columbia MFA program in the mid-1990s, the Narrator becomes friends with his classmate Billy Campbell, an outsider from the rural Midwest with the rugged good looks and talent that the Narrator wishes he had. In one painful scene towards the end of the novel, Billy taunts the Narrator at a party:

“Seriously,” Billy persisted, “how do you get through life with your hands like that? It’s like you haven’t even fucking typed.” He put down the bottle, collared my wrist, and held out my palm for inspection. “You’ve got to feel this. It’s like a fucking baby’s skin. Go on, touch it.”

Their friendship has declined because of what the Narrator insists was a misunderstanding when he kissed Billy in the dark during group sex. The Narrator’s feelings towards Billy are more of the intensely platonic sort, so it’s likely the truth. Nevertheless, the deep wound of losing Billy as a friend and heightened mid-90s homophobia suggest that the Narrator would not be as open to swapping gender roles as Steven is.

One might point to Steven’s age compared to David and the Narrator as a reason for his being more secure in his masculinity. But that would ignore Paul, the main character of The Great Man Theory, who is also a 40-something adjunct professor and father in Brooklyn. But instead of accepting that his career will never be what he wants and devoting more attention to his 11-year old daughter Mabel, Paul becomes more entrenched in his rigidly Luddite and leftist political beliefs. His desperate desire to become a consequential man of history leads him to abandon his anti-social-media philosophy once his rants against the president (an anonymized Donald Trump) gain traction. He soon centers his whole life on being an anonymous online political firebrand.

But Wayne makes it clear that his protagonists are not to be rallied around as victims of an unjust society. David from Loner has few redeeming qualities, showing a complete lack of empathy (“How dispensable are most people in our lives, collections of matter filling empty space until they’re recycled”). Apartment being one of quieter and more sensitive novels, the Narrator isn’t made out to be despicable as much as he is pitiable. But Paul from The Great Man Theory is infuriating in his self-righteous narcissism, such as when he cannot comprehend why his preteen daughter might have body image issues. Or when he thoughtlessly pontificates to Mabel and her middle-school friends at her birthday party (which he did almost nothing in preparation, forcing the girls to sit around in his mother’s depressing apartment with little to do except sift through his old DVDs) on the virtues of the rock music of his youth:

“[The Beatles are] the best band of all time. Well, not the best the best—their early stuff is bubblegum, and their politics are hippie mantras, and I generally prefer the Stones’ sensibility, plus the Clash mattered a lot more to me when I was younger—or, I guess I should say, they’re “the only band that matters, period—but in terms of innovation and prolificness and sheer virtuosity, no one else comes close. Except Dylan, for lyrics. Though he’s actually very underrated for his melodies.”

I genuinely wanted to punch the page when I first read the above. I mean that as a compliment to Wayne.

But Wayne is not interested in mere shaming. He recognizes that, for all his protagonists’ flaws, they are operating within the social logic of their class. In Loner, David is studying at one of the most ruthlessly hierarchical institutions in the world in Harvard, a place that is seeking to ceaselessly sort out its own, first by separating the wheat from the chaff via a purposely opaque and supposedly egalitarian admissions system (note that Loner was published well before the scandals of Operation Varsity Blues), and then picking through the wheat itself via exclusive social clubs, prestigious internships, and ultimately, occupation of the most elite rungs of society. Veronica herself associates exclusively within her privileged class, often making her less-wealthy classmates feel looked down upon. What makes Loner great is how for all his flaws, David comes off as understandable in the beginning, thereby luring readers into identifying with him until it’s too late. Some of the best moments in the book are his acerbic assessments of his peers, which will be relatable to anyone who’s ever felt unfairly situated below their rightful lot in life:

You guys crack me up,” Ivana said, shaking her head fondly. “You’re so weird.”

They weren’t, in the slightest. They were completely ordinary, all of them, having already pledged their fealty to one another halfway through the first week of college, with no aspirations to maraud beyond the claustrophobic perimeter and dirty-sock musk of Justin and Kevin’s room.

In Apartment, the Narrator’s close friendship with Billy allows him to experience first-hand how differently people treat them. It’s Billy who becomes the darling of the MFA class, whereas the Narrator became the workshop’s whipping boy from day one for no discernible reason. It’s Billy who gets invitations to Superbowl parties, not the Narrator. And even when Billy tries to be the Narrator’s wingman with women, it is to no avail:

He’d done a similar routine before at parties. While I appreciated his good-faith attempts to get me involved—our success rates in this department were as asymmetric as possible, discounting his first night in the apartment—it was emasculating, as if I didn’t have the wherewithal to navigate the world of women on my own.

When the Narrator watches The Silence of the Lambs and fantasizes about “somehow [wearing] Billy’s body like an exoskeleton, moving through the world in his impervious chassis,” he doesn’t seem so crazy.

Paul’s resentments in The Great Man Theory are also understandable—he has to move in with his mother and endure drunken abuse from his Uber passengers. His lowest point comes when the tenured faculty at Paul’s university vote against extending health care for the adjuncts because of an additional $60 a month. Conor’s motivations in The Winner are far simpler: He needs money to support his mother, which not coincidentally makes him the least interesting of the Wayneian protagonists and The Winner Wayne’s weakest novel.

It is undoubtedly better to be wealthy, beautiful, well-liked, and successful. And Wayne recognizes that we fawn over these types of people, regardless of whatever pledges to equality we make. So are we disdainful of the Wayneian protagonists for buying into a corrupt system, or are we actually just scornful of them for simply not knowing their place?

Steven is subjected to these same social and economic pressures in The Au Pair. His students learn that he is living on an allowance when his stipend payment alert pops up on his shared screen when he’s teaching a class. Steven’s second novel, The Cruelty of April, is blasted for gazing into the “sweaty navel of upper-middle-class whiteness” while younger and more fashionable writers are praised for what he judges to be vain inconsequence:

[Steven] went to his room to quell the temptation, picking up a novel that The New Yorker had just reviewed enthusiastically. It was yet another work of autofiction, a genre he held in low regard for its seemingly cosmopolitan and bohemian pose but ultimately provincial self-mythologizing. But he was also envious of this critically acclaimed younger writer for being able to get away with a 118-page story of almost parodically low stakes (would the unnamed narrator’s prose poem win a chapbook contest?) that would draw a limited but highbrow readership pontificating about “the contingent status of poetry under late capitalism,” for not needing to worry about producing a surefire bestseller, even for, according to his bio and rakish author photo by the window of a shabby-chic apartment, enjoying what looked to be the life of an unattached Brooklyn flaneur.

The biggest gut punch for Steven comes when he accidentally reads a text sent to Lucy by her employee, all but revealing their affair. He’s been too depressed to have sex with Lucy for a long time and has fantasized endlessly about Astrid ever since he saw her nanny profile. Still, he stews over his belief that “[t]hat text would never have been sent if Cruelty of April had done well.”

Now, Wayne has set the scene for Steven to fulfill his destiny as a Wayneian protagonist, just like David in Loner, the Narrator in Apartment, Paul in The Great Man Theory, and Conor in The Winner: commit an act of climactic wretchedness, spurred on by a toxic mix of wounded male pride and fear of irrelevance.

But Steven is not the one who commits the grand gesture in his own story. It is rather Astrid who (potentially) murders Lucy. Steven does help exonerate Astrid in her trial, but he turns out to not even the most consequential character in his own story.

Thus, The Au Pair functions as a metanarrative about the evolution of the Wayneian protagonist. After a decade of trying to climb back to his former place at the top of the pyramid, he has realized that he may never return. And that is okay! Following Astrid’s trial, she becomes a critically and commercially successful novelist, the type that Steven once dreamed of being. When they are reunited a couple of years later, Steven is genuinely happy for her. If a reproachable trait of the entitled white male novelist is the need to dominate the spotlight, especially relative to his girlfriend or wife, Steven does not have it, at least not anymore:

The hosannas thrown her way that had once been for him and would never be again did gnaw him some. But her success turned him on and flattered him. She could be with just about anyone in the world right now—Pulitzer winners, tech billionaires, the movie stars in his building—and she’d still chosen him.

If Lucy had been a writer with this kind of success, it would’ve eaten him alive.

“A little,” he admitted. “But I’m proud of you. I’m proud to be with you.

In return, Astrid retains her unshakable admiration of Steven as having written a work of art (The Cruelty of April) that means so much to her. So long as this mutual respect exists between Steven and Astrid, neither will be made miserable by one another’s success, or lack thereof. They realize that they have never stopped loving each other.

In this regard, The Au Pair is a tale of optimism. The Wayneian protagonist has finally found peace with his own limitations. For this, Steven is rewarded with the rare happy ending in Wayne’s literary imagination. But are we actually supposed to buy it? Shortly after Lucy’s death, when Steven tells his best friend Brian about what has happened, Brian remarks that if what Steven is telling him is indeed true—that yes, a sad middle-aged man and a gorgeous and devoted young Norwegian nanny found love and the one human obstacle in their way conveniently died—that it would make for a bad novel. Steven even alludes to Lolita’s deus ex car-accident.

There is indeed something creepily inhumane about the ending. After re-professing their undying love for each other, Steven and Astrid get married. His children, who’ve always also loved Astrid, happily accept her as their new mother, and the happy new family buy property in a remote Norwegian fishing village to live out their happy new lives. The Wayneian protagonist has finally found peace. All he had to do was to give up his humanity.

The Au Pair is a good read, though it doesn’t hit the heights of the bleakly honest Loner or the insightful sensitivity of Apartment. But within the context of Wayne’s oeuvre, it becomes a more fascinating work, the latest exhibit of a literary mind obsessed with the seemingly unsolvable riddle of modern masculinity. Given the chilling, if darkly humorous, ending of The Au Pair, let’s hope that Wayne is not finished in his search for answers.

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Chris Jesu Lee is a writer whose work has been published in The Metropolitan Review, The Believer, The Cleveland Review of Books, and Current Affairs. He also writes cultural essays on his Substack, Salieri Redemption.

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