High-Rise

Laing is a 30-year-old divorced man who teaches at the medical school across from the high-rise. Laing moves to the development seeking a new life in the privacy of an apartment complex. The somewhat bohemian Laing initially stands out among the inveterate conformists; however, ultimately this independence makes Laing the best-suited to finding a new, more meaningful lifestyle in the high-rise. As he notices, the high-rise is “a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation” (11).

Royal describes Laing as the building’s truest tenant (89). This is the reason that, of the three main characters, Laing is the only one who not only survives but thrives. Laing survives because, unlike Wilder and Royal, he accepts his position in the high-rise. As his neighbors move upward into abandoned units, Laing stays in his apartment to start a new life with his sister and Eleanor. In this domestic arrangement Laing finds both freedom and singular purpose in his role as provider.

Laing’s name is an allusion to the psychiatrist R. D. Laing, a prominent figure in what the public called the antipsychiatry movement (unlike others in this movement, Laing believed in treating mental illness).