The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

A Novel

by Adelle Waldman

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Pub Date Jun 25 2013 | Archive Date Jun 03 2014

Description

Bold, touching, and funny—a debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the coming-of-age of a brilliant young literary man

“He was not the kind of guy who disappeared after sleeping with a woman—and certainly not after the condom broke. On the contrary: Nathaniel Piven was a product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct 1990s college education. He had learned all about male privilege. Moreover, he was in possession of a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience.” –from The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

Nate Piven is a rising star in Brooklyn’s literary scene. After several lean and striving years, he has his pick of both magazine assignments and women: Juliet, the hotshot business reporter; Elisa, his gorgeous ex-girlfriend, now friend; and Hannah, “almost universally regarded as nice and smart, or smart and nice,” who is lively fun and holds her own in conversation with his friends.

This absorbing and funny tale is set in a twenty-first century literary world alive with wit and conversation. Here Adelle Waldman plunges into the psyche of a sensitive, modern man—who is drawn to women, yet has a habit of letting them down, who thinks of himself as beyond superficial judgment, yet constantly struggles with his own status anxiety. With tough-minded intelligence and wry good humor, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. reveals one particular (though also alarmingly familiar) young man’s thoughts about women and love.

Bold, touching, and funny—a debut novel by a brilliant young woman about the coming-of-age of a brilliant young literary man

“He was not the kind of guy who disappeared after sleeping with a woman—and...

Advance Praise

"Wow. What a psychologically astute, and very, very witty novel—about a young male you would think you might hate (but you don't; or, at least, I didn’t), by a young female writer you can't help but love." —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances

"Novelist Adelle Waldman does a very tricky thing: she succeeds in crossing the gender line, imagining the world from behind the eyes of a male character both sympathetically and unsentimentally. This former young-literary-man-in-Brooklyn found himself cringing in recognition." —William Deresiewicz, author of A Jane Austen Education: How Six Novels Taught Me About Love, Friendship, and the Things That Really Matter

"I can't remember the last novel this good about being young and smart and looking for love in the big city. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. reads as if one of the top tier 19th-century novelists zeroed her social x-ray eyes onto present-moment Brooklyn. Up-and-coming writers and artists everywhere will be squirming with uncomfortable recognition of themselves, their friends, and their psyches; far more readers will be thanking Adelle Waldman for this hilarious, big-hearted, ruthlessly intelligent, and ridiculously well-written novel." —Charles Bock, author of the best-selling novel Beautiful Children

"Bracing and astute. Waldman writes these crisp, smart sentences that are every bit as thoughtful as her characters—people whose relationships founder and flourish in ways that will captivate readers from page one." —Fiona Maazel, author of Last Last Chance and Woke Up Lonely

"Deliciously funny, sharply observed, elegantly told, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is the best debut I’ve encountered in years, the best novel about New York, and the best novel about contemporary manhood and the crazy state of gender roles and just "contemporary" life. With a pitch perfect balance of satire and sympathy, reminiscent of Mary McCarthy’s The Group, Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, and Jay McInerney’s Brightness Falls, Adelle Waldman’s voice is nevertheless entirely—and unabashedly—her own." --Joanna Smith Rakoff, author of the novel A Fortunate Age

"This sharp, unsentimental debut novel is as fiercely intelligent as it is deliciously cheeky and well-observed. Literary Brooklyn and its striving inhabitants may never again be so unsparingly--and so winningly-- portrayed. I can't wait to read more from Adelle Waldman." --Joanna Hershon, author of The German Bride and A Dual Inheritance

"A hysterically honest ethnographic study of the male hipster in his natural habitat (Brooklyn), The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is the sympathetic portrait of a terminally-adolescent, over-educated, indecisive and slightly scruffy thirty-something. Nate is so convincingly drawn you’ll want to hug him, lecture him and shake some sense into him simultaneously. Waldman has deftly written a laugh-out-loud treatise on why he didn’t call." – Allison Amend, author of A Nearly Perfect Copy