The unnamed narrator is a New York University graduate, who is living in his great aunt's two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Manhattan, after she has moved to New Jersey.
The narrator meets Billy, a working class young man from a small town in Illinois, who is living in a basement storage room.
[6] The novel opens in August 1996 in New York City, where the narrator is enrolled in the Columbia University's prestigious Master of Fine Arts Writing program, and lives in a two-bedroom in Stuyvesant Town on the east side in Manhattan.
After the semester concludes, the narrator receives a letter from his landlord ordering him to vacate the apartment since he is in violation of the lease for illegal subletting.
The narrator notes that the university's "extortionate tuition and dearth of fellowship stipends saw to [half the class had obvious socioeconomic advantages]".
[2] In an interview the author states, "it's a lot easier to spend eight years writing a first novel or take an unpaid internship when you know that you have an upper-middle-class parachute you can open in an emergency.
The irony in Apartment is that the narrator is not only ashamed of his upper-middle-class provenance, but thinks it's an artistic detriment, since he has nothing worth writing about, whereas he fetishizes Billy's Midwestern working-class authenticity."
[8] After mocking the narrator for never having to hold a manual labor job, the narrator observes: "How easily he could mock me for my privileges, but I doubted he had ever considered the copious ones he enjoyed, which society didn't catalog as overly...and he was never made to feel guilty for these natural advantages and resources he'd done nothing to earn" [2] "If masculinity is one theme, the other is fear of failure", wrote J. Oliver Conroy in a review.
[But while] Wonder Boys is funny and life-affirming — Apartment is dark and deeply sad"[9] Both the narrator and Billy are only children, and both are raised without fathers present.
The narrator notes that after his parents' divorce, "I had never longed for a sibling as much as that moment...I just wanted another person to shoulder the pain with me, to go through exactly what I'd have to go through".
[2] In Billy's novel, No Man's Land, the narrator is divorced, and both his father and son are deceased, a fact that most of the writing workshop class misses during discussion.
[2] In a bar the narrator and Billy meet Jim, a much older, divorced former playwright whose given up on his dreams, and describes himself as a "nobody man": "I'm out of my time's joint...doesn't have a point of view.
Anthony Domestico writes, "The narrator thinks he's a benevolent friend to Billy; he's just as much a vampiric consumer, drinking in his writerly gifts and blue-collar bona fides."
[10] Stefan Beck writes, "Contra most of the critical response to Apartment, the book absolutely is not 'about male friendship.'
"[4] The idea for the novel came in February 2017 when the author suddenly realized he never wrote about Stuyvesant Town, a place he lived off and on for 14 years.