What if a man meets the kind of woman he claims to want?
By Jess Walter |
July 14, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
THE data are in. All precincts have reported. It's official: Men suck. At least when it comes to relationships, they do. Men are sex-obsessed and self-absorbed, shallow, callow, capricious and cruel. I wouldn't date us if we were one of the last two genders on Earth.
Consider Exhibit A, "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.," a smart, engaging 21st-century comedy of manners in which the debut novelist Adelle Waldman crawls convincingly around inside the head of one Nathaniel (Nate) Piven.
Nate is like a jigsaw puzzle you find in the closet at a rented beach house: No matter how nice the picture on the box, at some point, after you've invested way too much time, you are going to realize that key pieces are missing. (Empathy? Self-awareness?)
Part of that vast herd of young writers roaming the Brooklyn bars and coffee shops, Nate is in his element talking smart to some woman on a Christmas-lighted fire escape. In this familiar "Girls" world, Waldman would seem to suggest, most of the sexual power still resides with the boys. A journalist by training, Waldman may not be breaking news here, but she does show herself to be a promising novelist and a savvy observer of human nature.
Compared with his boorish friends, Nate isn't a bad guy. In fact, to borrow from Dashiell Hammett, he might just be worse than bad; he's half good. The "product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education," Nate has, we are told, "a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience."
Yet we meet him at a particularly telling moment. Late for an ex-girlfriend's party, he bumps into another ex, one he hasn't seen since the day of her abortion - Waldman employing that classic literary device, the unreliable narrator's condom. "It was no one's fault," he thinks in the first of many impressive displays of generosity toward himself. (Nate's ability to pat his own back is such that you worry about his clavicles.) Not only did he pay for the abortion, he accompanied her there and took her home in a taxi. Clearly he "had done everything that could have been expected of him."
It's to Waldman's credit then that she uses this straw-man setup to go deeper and pose an interesting question: Is it fair to expect better from an intelligent, evolved man?
You will cringe like a middle-school teacher whenever two boys are alone: "You got there first," and "Go for it," and "I'd do her." Such frat-chat makes Waldman's point - perhaps the point of all comedies of manners - that behind even the most complex male-female interactions are the same old boy-girl banalities.
(The book is fairly quiet about boy-boy and girl-girl relationships, but we can assume those are stupid, too.)
Consider Exhibit A, "The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.," a smart, engaging 21st-century comedy of manners in which the debut novelist Adelle Waldman crawls convincingly around inside the head of one Nathaniel (Nate) Piven.
Nate is like a jigsaw puzzle you find in the closet at a rented beach house: No matter how nice the picture on the box, at some point, after you've invested way too much time, you are going to realize that key pieces are missing. (Empathy? Self-awareness?)
Part of that vast herd of young writers roaming the Brooklyn bars and coffee shops, Nate is in his element talking smart to some woman on a Christmas-lighted fire escape. In this familiar "Girls" world, Waldman would seem to suggest, most of the sexual power still resides with the boys. A journalist by training, Waldman may not be breaking news here, but she does show herself to be a promising novelist and a savvy observer of human nature.
Compared with his boorish friends, Nate isn't a bad guy. In fact, to borrow from Dashiell Hammett, he might just be worse than bad; he's half good. The "product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education," Nate has, we are told, "a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience."
Yet we meet him at a particularly telling moment. Late for an ex-girlfriend's party, he bumps into another ex, one he hasn't seen since the day of her abortion - Waldman employing that classic literary device, the unreliable narrator's condom. "It was no one's fault," he thinks in the first of many impressive displays of generosity toward himself. (Nate's ability to pat his own back is such that you worry about his clavicles.) Not only did he pay for the abortion, he accompanied her there and took her home in a taxi. Clearly he "had done everything that could have been expected of him."
It's to Waldman's credit then that she uses this straw-man setup to go deeper and pose an interesting question: Is it fair to expect better from an intelligent, evolved man?
You will cringe like a middle-school teacher whenever two boys are alone: "You got there first," and "Go for it," and "I'd do her." Such frat-chat makes Waldman's point - perhaps the point of all comedies of manners - that behind even the most complex male-female interactions are the same old boy-girl banalities.
(The book is fairly quiet about boy-boy and girl-girl relationships, but we can assume those are stupid, too.)
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