Alt title: My favorite book you shouldn’t read
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. We submit ourselves to these intimate inspections and simultaneously inflict them on others and try to keep our psyches intact—to keep from becoming cold and callous—and we hope that at the end of it we wind up happier than our grandparents, who didn’t spend this vast period of their lives, these prime years, so thoroughly alone, coldly and explicitly anatomized again and again. But who cares, right? It’s just girl stuff.
― Adelle Waldman, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
Books are just about the only thing I have a fairly good memory for. I can recall miscellaneous details from books I read a decade ago far more clearly than the conversations I’ve had in the last week. Despite this, I still find it enormously pleasurable to reread my favorite books. The thing that thrills me about a good book is rarely the sequence of events, characters, or the information conveyed. It’s about the feeling, the ineffable vibe conjured by a synchrony of beautiful prose and new ideas, for which, like the first sip of coffee on a chilly morning, memory is a poor substitute.
However, being an intellectually ambitious and pathologically self-denying sort of person, I don’t let myself reread books all that often. But this year, as a Christmas present, I decided to reread Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., which has the dubious distinction of being my favorite book that I don’t think you should read.1 Probably. I’ve convinced four people to read it in the last decade, and only one of them liked it. Two positively hated it.
The book follows a year in the life of a 30-year-old writer, the titular Nathaniel “Nate” Piven, “a product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education”, whose career is finally taking off after selling his first book. His days are spent writing essays in a dingy Brooklyn one-bedroom, sipping lattes at cafes, and going to parties or readings with his similarly bookish friends. And, of course, dating.
In retrospect, it’s easy to understand why so many people hate this book. It’s not a morally comforting read. Nate, whose brain you’re forced to cohabit for all 240 pages, is a frequently infuriating roommate. He’s undeniably brilliant in a narrow, literary sort of way, but despite “a functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience”, remains woefully unselfaware. In his romantic misadventures, he swings wildly between playing the attentive, generous partner, and an avoidant, capricious asshole (not to mention a barely repressed misogynist).
Besides the exquisite prose, keen social insights, and mordant humor, the main reason this book fascinated (and disturbed) me when I checked it out from my college library at age 19 was that it made me feel seen—in a bad way. I cringed with recognition when I read about Nate’s fumbling attempts to at love and connection during his high school years, and felt unpleasant pangs of resonance when he finally achieved his long sought-after success (and the status that came with it), how he felt “not only glad but vindicated”, because his prior unpopularity “though persistent, had never seemed quite right.” (At the time I hadn’t come close to achieving the popularity I thought I deserved, but I knew I’d feel similarly if I did.) Rereading at age 30, I related even more to the book’s leading woman, Hannah, who Nate criticizes2 for not being ambitious enough, and for “laughing off flaws proactively, defensively,” as a way of avoiding the vulnerability of being seen giving something her all.
While we don’t get a direct window into their heads, Nate’s friends are often just as grating as the man himself. He and the rest of the Brooklyn literati are constantly competing with each other for article assignments, editorial positions, bigger book deals—in short, for status. For all their Ivy League pedigrees and sparkling wit, they turn to be just as lizard-brained as the rest of us, sizing up and subtly demeaning one another, nursing their grievances, and scrabbling desperately for social and professional success.
But they aren’t caricatures either, and that may be the most frustrating thing about this book for some readers. It’s so easy to feel antipathy for these smug, self-satisfied intellectuals—the men in particular—and their frequently sleazy, occasionally self-destructive tendencies. But this isn’t a straightforward hit piece, and Waldman deliberately humanizes even her most loathsome characters. Jason, for example, an exhaustingly edgy and repulsively shallow magazine editor, is also revealed to be a genuinely decent friend, “staying out too late, drinking too much, on a work night, because Nate needed the company” after an acrimonious breakup.3 This is what I mean when I said that the book isn’t morally comforting: the denizens of Waldman’s Brooklyn aren’t monsters, just depressingly human. They’re uncertain, selfish, and hungry for connection and recognition, just like the rest of us.
TL;DR: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is one of the best pieces of psychological portraiture I’ve ever read, and one of my favorite novels full stop. There’s also a good chance you’ll hate it. 10/10, would not recommend.
Footnotes
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My actual favorite books are Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Either/Or by Elif Batuman, and you should absolutely read both of them. ↩
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Internally; Nate is incapable of initiating conflict. ↩
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Granted it was only acrimonious because of Nate’s unforgivably terrible communication skills. Like I said, infuriating! ↩