https://medium.com/springboard-thought/apartment-exposing-a-generational-male-human-condition-be39dbde2559

“Sometimes the only way to start over in life is to burn down the house.”

Simultaneously evoking the conventional while being unconventional itself, Apartment has an uncanny knack of casting you into the role of the unnamed narrator-protagonist.

They — He — You? — are a somewhat middling, but still budding, writer in an MFA program at Columbia University. Here we meet Billy. Broke but charismatic; naturally gifted, the embodiment of small-town, kind of jock, writer. The polar opposite of our narrator, who is middle class, shy and introverted, highly educated, and already possessing some experience in the form of copy editing.
The narrator also possesses arguably the most coveted thing in New York: the rent-controlled apartment. In the hours of the MFA program, an easy camaraderie is struck between the two and a sort of natural, symbiotic relationship emerges; morphing throughout the novel.

They move in and the following time becomes the defining period of our narrator's life.
Like all good literary fiction, Apartment is about many things.

It also sticks with you long after you’re finished. An almost unspooling occurs upon reflection; a time bomb of secondary, slow revelations that make it apparent that it's smarter than you’d expected.

“…this was all we collectively had, we knew no protest songs, had little to protest — and I felt a swelling in my chest, a surge of joy flowering out through my limbs; there is nothing like crooning in a group to a chorus to communicate to yourselves and the world that you are young and drunk and unhindered by responsibility, that the future stretches out endlessly before you like a California highway.”

For one, it is quintessential for the male generation, I think. Taking place in 1996, at the start, if you recollect the 90s boy/man you know or are, this feels spot on. It is an era and generation that, I think, really brought forth the discussion on toxic masculinity and performing gender.
Two ways of performing the male gender are embodied in these two roommates — naturally resulting in a tense, dramatic, powder keg type situation. You also manage to get the “college experience” with just the two main characters and their interactions.

One, easy to like; a manly man, a Hemmingway figure that gets the girls and though of meager means, still collects what a guy is supposed to want with little to no effort.

“to be on the fringes of an already marginalized subculture is simply lonely.”

The other, not performing their gender — even with middle-class wealth on their side — is an exercise in futility (for the most part).

The narrator, however, is also the more intersectional archetype as well. When Billy does not Hemmingway, he too takes on the characteristics displayed by the narrator.

Inevitably, as all roommate situations tend to go, tragedy occurs. But in this modern-day story, it is multifaceted: it is found in the plot unfolding, in the gender roles being performed, and by each specific archetype of masculinity.

With extraordinary brevity, the modern man is put on trial.

“but hearing Seger’s lyrics, rather than identifying with someone else’s expression of similar feelings, as art was supposed to do for its audience, I thought that there was a different quality to mine, it was singular and peculiar and grotesque, a lonely flavor of loneliness.”

While a definitive verdict of this metaphorical trial is not readily apparent (it would be sorry had it tried such a feat, I think), and it is left up to the occupant of the narrator to take what they can from it — what is apparent in no uncertain terms is that it is endlessly hard to find what truly nourishes us in this society we have erected. Especially if we are not the standard that society demands. Western values are at odds with the concept.

Some of the components to be navigated: privilege, wealth, sexuality, gender performance, “raw” or “natural” ability, beauty, intelligence, are all one size fits all.

Navigating to some semblance of how we ourselves design our success and happiness is always a personal task that no component of the system we interact with manages to help with.
Certainly, the human condition doesn’t either.

In such a system, for some individuals, freedom might look like straying or altogether removing oneself from the game they are told to play. And, as a survival mechanism in the process of growing up, perhaps our minds try to help us cope with this by altering our memories.
Would we remember our past in the manner we do, had we created a way of life that did not constantly dig, grind, or maim us?

“Remember this, I commanded myself again, though I knew that this memory — like all of them — would lose an essential and truthful quality over the years. The notion that we repress or redact significant chunks of the past strikes me as a dramatic contrivance for storytellers more than a realistic psychological phenomenon; but that we alter or retrospection in subtle ways, to airbrush out unpalatable blemishes here and there, much as we sweep detritus in our present consciousness under the carpet: that seems quite natural.”