The Apartment on Calle Uruguay
By Zachary Lazar
Catapault, April 26, 2022
A haunting new novel by the author of Vengeance in which a chance encounter between a blocked painter and a journalist leads to a complicated romance that reveals their buried histories and vulnerabilities against the backdrops of an America in chaos and Mexico.
Beginning in the first summer of the post-Obama world, Zachary Lazar's bewitching and masterful new novel tells the story of Christopher Bell, a blocked painter on the East End of Long Island, and Ana Ramirez, a journalist who fled the crisis in Venezuela and is looking for work in New York. Bell has always felt marked by his foreignness, having emigrated to the U.S. as a child, and has come to believe that "words like 'identity' and 'American' are somehow very meaningful and very meaningless at the same time.” He has retreated to a modest house near a patch of woods, “a rural nowhere…that sometimes held more meaning for me in its silence than human language.”
In the woods, he encounters Ana, who is trying to “reinvent herself as the kind of person she’d been before” the world she knew disappeared. A complicated romance develops that gradually reveals their buried histories—from the death of Bell’s former partner, Malika Jordan, a fellow artist, to the prison farm where he visits Malika’s incarcerated brother Jesse, to Mexico City, where Ana’s exiled family now lives. All of them have faced the same problem: how to build a new life once the idea you've had of "home" vanishes or becomes unrecognizable.
The Apartment on Calle Uruguay is a haunting exploration of love, art, and the cost of transformation. It lays out a fiercely intentional and introspective way of living in an unjust world.
Selected Praise
"Fascinating . . . Lazar perfectly orchestrates a symphony of frustration, empathy, fear, and hope into a thoughtful and timely tale."
—Publishers Weekly
"[Lazar's] brand of introspection is page-turning, informed by his hip sensibility, musical way with language, and sensuality. As deep a dive as Lazar takes into one man's alienation—from himself as well as the world around him—the book soars with timely truth . . . An engrossing statement of where we are, told through the eyes of a reluctant survivor."
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A politically deft and emotionally devastating exploration of what it means to live in exile. With great lyricism and sly wit, Lazar illuminates the many varieties of longing for home."
—Jenny Offill, author of Weather and Dept. of Speculation
About the Author
Zachary Lazar is the author of five previous books, including the novel Sway, the memoir Evening's Empire: The Story of My Father's Murder, and the novel I Pity the Poor Immigrant, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2014. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, and the 2015 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for "a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence." Lazar lives in New Orleans, where he is on the creative writing faculty at Tulane University.