Codes and Conventions
Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
William Heinemann, 256pp, £14.99, ISBN 9780434022328
reviewed by Rachel Sykes
Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., tells the story of Nate Piven, a determinedly 'literary type' living the yuppie lifestyle in modern day Brooklyn. Waldman guides the reader through the best part of a year in this writer’s consciousness, where we are helpless observers to the romantic detritus accumulated around the literary scene of New York.
If you care little for literature and the literary, then the carousel of social engagements that Waldman narrates could quickly wear thin. Nate’s intellectual travails play out almost as a side plot, reaching their peak in an excruciating essay on the commodity of conscience. Morality, Nate argues, is something that only the rich can afford, a product designed to make gentrification slightly, but not unbearably, less comfortable. Nate is perceptive on the pacifying religion of Whole Foods and organic cottons, but the real problem occurs in the narrowness of his awareness: he is unable to intellectualise his actions towards others. Gradually, the reader becomes more aware of Nate’s actions than he is himself, and we watch with clenched teeth (or fists) as the novel’s eponymous 'love affair' rapidly fails.
The main object of Nate’s affection is Hannah, a fellow, if slightly less successful, Brooklyn essayist. Intelligent, funny and full of self-confidence, Hannah has the misfortune of receiving the relationship’s short straw. If the novel is immersed in the judgmental ticking of Nate’s mind, it is equally alert to the dwindling of Hannah’s self-esteem. As the relationship falters, Hannah’s artistic output fades and it is here that Waldman introduces one of the more interesting questions underpinning her novel. Who is to blame when identity becomes expressed through the existence of a relationship, or when a partnership between artists supports the creativity of just one party?
And when, between the boom years of college and the increasingly belated onset of midlife crisis, did dating amongst the literary darlings of New York stop being any fun?
What is striking, and already much praised, about Nathaniel P. is the voice that Waldman writes for Nate. Waldman’s writing reads straight out of the nineteenth-century and, trickily focalised through the characterisation of a clever-but-not-quite-nice-guy, the novel is tethered to a protagonist lacking in self-reflection. Around him the author builds a literary Brooklyn that could be Edith Wharton’s Manhattan at the turn of the last century, peopled as it is with intricately observed supports who throw more light on the subject than the subject can muster for himself. Like Wharton, Waldman is interested in moral codes and conventions, how we construct them and how they then rule our emotions. Nate does not change because he does not have to, and Waldman neither redeems nor condemns him. The literary world goes on turning - bitching, but inevitably turning - while Nate is left as confused as ever by his relationships with others.
This neutrality allows the novel to be unwaveringly modern in its sexual politics. Nate’s appraisal of women is both honest and uncomfortable: he is fickle, tracking external flaws of each member of the opposite sex and worrying incessantly that his friends might find his clever girlfriend too annoying and not hot enough. The morning after he connects with Hannah, Nate pauses to evaluate how attractive he finds her: ‘If Hannah had been more obviously hot, he was pretty sure that he would have given her more thought before the other night, when she had been the only woman present who was at all a viable candidate for his interest.’ In terms of the judgments that befall the women he meets, Hannah gets off lightly. All are ranked on scales of viability to his needs: if one is too emotionally draining, another is too stocky and yet another too frigid.
What makes these criticisms so damning, however, is Nate’s proclamations of allegiance to third wave feminism. Though he can summarise the strengths and weaknesses of The Female Eunuch, Nate still fails to examine any of the privileges he experiences, observing his romantic life with the gravitas of the Byronic hero, but remaining twice as removed from its emotion. When his relationship with Hannah begins to demand reserves of empathy which run perilously low within him, the reader is forced to watch as their relationship, and Hannah’s confidence, begin their inevitable decline.
Still, it remains unclear whether blame is an issue here. Rather than writing a damning appraisal of the male psyche and dividing the sexes between Mars and Venus, Waldman rewrites misogyny into the confusions of an individual intellectual. Nate is not the enemy; he is not even Nathan Zuckerman, although he could, perhaps, be his grandson. If the reader’s sympathies flee to Hannah, a quick flash of Nate’s inner monologue brings them back to the protagonist, and we re-evaluate everyone’s motivations. The fierce interplay between sex and sexual politics extend the romantic relationships into a massive site of conflict and identity crisis. Nathaniel P. is not a romance novel, then, but a novel that takes romance as its intellectual subject.
This subtle but important distinction seems to have been missed by much of the press. Waldman’s debut has attracted a lot of attention attuned to its ‘romantic’ components. A ‘female lament’, as The New Yorker calls it in an unreservedly rave review, for ‘our generation’s romantic chaos’. The novel has been likened to Sex and the City, to Middlemarch and to the work of Jane Austen for its handling of a cutthroat, literary New York in all its painful and hormonal glory. There’s something stilted, however, in the tone of reviewers that epitomise many of the novel’s central concerns. The Telegraph provided a particularly misguided reading, describing Nate, first and foremost, as ‘a writer seeking love in Brooklyn’. This kind of tagline is designed to dress Nate up in the kind of rom-com clothes that cannot fit, because, repulsed by all its tattered and frivolously unintellectual emotions, love isn’t something that Nate is remotely concerned with.
Reviewers have also uniformly praised Waldman for her portrayal of the male protagonist, particularly for her invasion of the mind of someone so often unlikable. This seems, in part, to be in dialogue with Clare Messud’s recent defence of the woman’s right to write unlikables. The characters of male novelists are ‘lifelike’, Messud complains, but the characters of female novelists are ‘likable’. This qualm is played with in Nathaniel P. where the narrator asks the reader to withhold judgment on a man who is ambiguously distasteful towards women. But reviewers have largely neglected the complexities of this psychological switch in favour of one central assertion: this is a novel for women because it is about women’s concerns.
This is a particularly ironic claim, considering that essentialism is one of the discussions at the heart of Nathaniel P. Confronted by a friend about his blasé attitude to the women in his life, Nate is informed that his diminutive attitude to relationships is in fact a symptom of patriarchy. Why is it, his friend asks, that men fail to apply the same intellectual considerations to the feelings of others:
Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability.
The novel is ultimately about the choice to live an intellectual life and how this often fails to account for contemporary structures of feeling. To that end, the novel also narrates the insufficiencies of a political quietism that is proudly over-informed; the inevitable movie adaptation seems destined to be sound tracked by the sound of tiny violins.
Nathaniel P. is not about people who do not care, who do not know any better, but about people who do nothing, who to varying degrees allow thinking to be enough. Nate’s comments on the commodity of conscience echo throughout the text as the characters observe their privilege and fail to interrogate it.
If you care little for literature and the literary, then the carousel of social engagements that Waldman narrates could quickly wear thin. Nate’s intellectual travails play out almost as a side plot, reaching their peak in an excruciating essay on the commodity of conscience. Morality, Nate argues, is something that only the rich can afford, a product designed to make gentrification slightly, but not unbearably, less comfortable. Nate is perceptive on the pacifying religion of Whole Foods and organic cottons, but the real problem occurs in the narrowness of his awareness: he is unable to intellectualise his actions towards others. Gradually, the reader becomes more aware of Nate’s actions than he is himself, and we watch with clenched teeth (or fists) as the novel’s eponymous 'love affair' rapidly fails.
The main object of Nate’s affection is Hannah, a fellow, if slightly less successful, Brooklyn essayist. Intelligent, funny and full of self-confidence, Hannah has the misfortune of receiving the relationship’s short straw. If the novel is immersed in the judgmental ticking of Nate’s mind, it is equally alert to the dwindling of Hannah’s self-esteem. As the relationship falters, Hannah’s artistic output fades and it is here that Waldman introduces one of the more interesting questions underpinning her novel. Who is to blame when identity becomes expressed through the existence of a relationship, or when a partnership between artists supports the creativity of just one party?
And when, between the boom years of college and the increasingly belated onset of midlife crisis, did dating amongst the literary darlings of New York stop being any fun?
What is striking, and already much praised, about Nathaniel P. is the voice that Waldman writes for Nate. Waldman’s writing reads straight out of the nineteenth-century and, trickily focalised through the characterisation of a clever-but-not-quite-nice-guy, the novel is tethered to a protagonist lacking in self-reflection. Around him the author builds a literary Brooklyn that could be Edith Wharton’s Manhattan at the turn of the last century, peopled as it is with intricately observed supports who throw more light on the subject than the subject can muster for himself. Like Wharton, Waldman is interested in moral codes and conventions, how we construct them and how they then rule our emotions. Nate does not change because he does not have to, and Waldman neither redeems nor condemns him. The literary world goes on turning - bitching, but inevitably turning - while Nate is left as confused as ever by his relationships with others.
This neutrality allows the novel to be unwaveringly modern in its sexual politics. Nate’s appraisal of women is both honest and uncomfortable: he is fickle, tracking external flaws of each member of the opposite sex and worrying incessantly that his friends might find his clever girlfriend too annoying and not hot enough. The morning after he connects with Hannah, Nate pauses to evaluate how attractive he finds her: ‘If Hannah had been more obviously hot, he was pretty sure that he would have given her more thought before the other night, when she had been the only woman present who was at all a viable candidate for his interest.’ In terms of the judgments that befall the women he meets, Hannah gets off lightly. All are ranked on scales of viability to his needs: if one is too emotionally draining, another is too stocky and yet another too frigid.
What makes these criticisms so damning, however, is Nate’s proclamations of allegiance to third wave feminism. Though he can summarise the strengths and weaknesses of The Female Eunuch, Nate still fails to examine any of the privileges he experiences, observing his romantic life with the gravitas of the Byronic hero, but remaining twice as removed from its emotion. When his relationship with Hannah begins to demand reserves of empathy which run perilously low within him, the reader is forced to watch as their relationship, and Hannah’s confidence, begin their inevitable decline.
Still, it remains unclear whether blame is an issue here. Rather than writing a damning appraisal of the male psyche and dividing the sexes between Mars and Venus, Waldman rewrites misogyny into the confusions of an individual intellectual. Nate is not the enemy; he is not even Nathan Zuckerman, although he could, perhaps, be his grandson. If the reader’s sympathies flee to Hannah, a quick flash of Nate’s inner monologue brings them back to the protagonist, and we re-evaluate everyone’s motivations. The fierce interplay between sex and sexual politics extend the romantic relationships into a massive site of conflict and identity crisis. Nathaniel P. is not a romance novel, then, but a novel that takes romance as its intellectual subject.
This subtle but important distinction seems to have been missed by much of the press. Waldman’s debut has attracted a lot of attention attuned to its ‘romantic’ components. A ‘female lament’, as The New Yorker calls it in an unreservedly rave review, for ‘our generation’s romantic chaos’. The novel has been likened to Sex and the City, to Middlemarch and to the work of Jane Austen for its handling of a cutthroat, literary New York in all its painful and hormonal glory. There’s something stilted, however, in the tone of reviewers that epitomise many of the novel’s central concerns. The Telegraph provided a particularly misguided reading, describing Nate, first and foremost, as ‘a writer seeking love in Brooklyn’. This kind of tagline is designed to dress Nate up in the kind of rom-com clothes that cannot fit, because, repulsed by all its tattered and frivolously unintellectual emotions, love isn’t something that Nate is remotely concerned with.
Reviewers have also uniformly praised Waldman for her portrayal of the male protagonist, particularly for her invasion of the mind of someone so often unlikable. This seems, in part, to be in dialogue with Clare Messud’s recent defence of the woman’s right to write unlikables. The characters of male novelists are ‘lifelike’, Messud complains, but the characters of female novelists are ‘likable’. This qualm is played with in Nathaniel P. where the narrator asks the reader to withhold judgment on a man who is ambiguously distasteful towards women. But reviewers have largely neglected the complexities of this psychological switch in favour of one central assertion: this is a novel for women because it is about women’s concerns.
This is a particularly ironic claim, considering that essentialism is one of the discussions at the heart of Nathaniel P. Confronted by a friend about his blasé attitude to the women in his life, Nate is informed that his diminutive attitude to relationships is in fact a symptom of patriarchy. Why is it, his friend asks, that men fail to apply the same intellectual considerations to the feelings of others:
Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. You’re sizing people up to see if they’re worth your time and attention, and they’re doing the same to you. It’s meritocracy applied to personal life, but there’s no accountability.
The novel is ultimately about the choice to live an intellectual life and how this often fails to account for contemporary structures of feeling. To that end, the novel also narrates the insufficiencies of a political quietism that is proudly over-informed; the inevitable movie adaptation seems destined to be sound tracked by the sound of tiny violins.
Nathaniel P. is not about people who do not care, who do not know any better, but about people who do nothing, who to varying degrees allow thinking to be enough. Nate’s comments on the commodity of conscience echo throughout the text as the characters observe their privilege and fail to interrogate it.