Since its July publication, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. has quickly become one of the most controversial novels of the year. The literary debut of author Adelle Waldman gives an account of the romantic and intellectual life of a young writer who, on the verge of publishing his first book, is starting to become, in the terminology of Nietzsche, who he is. The issue is that women don’t like who that is, neither the women the protagonist Nate dates, nor women readers, many of whom find him this “sensitive literary man” the most loathsome male character in modern American fiction since Philip Roth’s lust-addled narcissist, Alexander Portnoy.
Nonetheless, Waldman’s landscape of early 21st-century life among the young, talented and ambitious urban elite has won a large following and wide acclaim, here at home as well as abroad. A Jane Austen-like social drama about the peculiar mating habits of a privileged class, Nathaniel P. is a compelling and unsentimental portrait of those who, frankly, do not easily or often command sympathy and affection. Waldman, a 36-year-old Baltimore native who now lives in Brooklyn, the “writerly” borough where her novel is set, seems to take pleasure in undercutting all sorts of platitudes and conventional wisdom. Indeed, from one perspective, her skillful novel may be best understood as a Balzac-like documentary detailing the effects of the sexual revolution—or what happens when under the banner of women’s freedom, men, free to choose among a multitude of possible partners, are afforded the luxury of having what they want at discount.
