'Adelle Waldman's debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., scrutinizes Nate and the subculture that he thrives in with a patient, anthropological detachment. A New York Times Editors' Choice and a Washington Post Notable book.

One of Waldman's great achievements is the way she so thoroughly sublets Nate's head so that we see situations, and especially the women, in his life through Nate's own narrow window, curtained by self-regard.The national bestseller, named a best book of the year by The New Yorker, NPR, Slate, The Economist, The New Republic, Bookforum, Baltimore City Paper, The Daily Beast, National Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Reader, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Buzzfeed and many others. But of course they're not, especially the guys, nor are they simply caricatures. You'd expect that Nate and his smarty-arty friends - who casually quote George Eliot and French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, who busy themselves writing essays on topics like 'Yoga as the New Orientalism,' and who flirt in emails citing Charles Dickens' campaigns against child labor - might be 'better' people somehow. Waldman's main character is a 30-year-old-writer named Nate Piven, a product of, we're told, 'a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education.' Educated awareness, however, doesn't translate into enlightened behavior, and that's one of the key themes of Waldman's novel. I inhaled this slim novel now I want to go back and read it again, to savor Waldman's mordant take on work, love and cannibalism among the up-and-coming Brooklyn intelligentsia. I'd still steer clear of the Duck people, but Waldman, who is herself a hip young literary person living in Brooklyn, has written such a crisp, comic novel of manners and ideas about her own tribe that I was completely won over. Both clans are ingrown and smug, each, in their own way, disdainful of the American mainstream. How?īefore I read Adelle Waldman's brilliant debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., I had about as much interest in reading about the hip, young literary types who've colonized Brooklyn as I do in watching Duck Dynasty, that reality show about a family of bearded Luddites who live in the Louisiana swamps.

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