by Matt Sitman
In an interview about her debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman describes how she approached developing the book’s central character, a 30-ish male writer living in Brooklyn named Nate:
I tried to come up with a plausible psychology for him because Nate, and some of the men I’ve dated and that my friends have dated don’t hurt other people for fun, but nor do they feel that the chance of hurting someone is so horrible that they should run the other direction. They must be torn between feeling bad but feeling also tempted to keep doing the things that lead, eventually, to heartbreak. I think it’s a predicament; there’s not exactly an answer. I don’t feel like I can say, “This is what’s wrong with Nate.” Human relationships are hard…
[H]is concern is justifying himself in his own eyes. That’s not quite the right concern; [the right concern] is the effect on other people. I wanted the book to reflect what life is like, and that there are ways in which people are not at all villains or in possession of some very obvious character flaw that makes them difficult to deal with in life. I wanted Nate to be more self-justifying than empathetic; it seems more true to the experience I’ve had in that you don’t come across that many people who are just really bad. I wanted to write in that gray area of life.
Sasha Weiss elaborates on the predicament Waldman’s exploring:
The pleasures of this novel—its lucidity and wry humor—are mixed with the sting of recognizing the essential unfairness of the sexual mores of our moment: after years of liberated fun, many women begin to feel terribly lonely when realize they want a commitment; men, who seem to have all the power to choose, are also stuck with an unasked-for power to inflict hurt. We’ll have to keep searching for an arrangement that works better, and monogamous coupledom may not be it, Waldman suggests. But she offers no balm, no solution—and tacitly resists a culture that offers sunny advice and reassurance to women.
Marc Tracy expands on the point:
[Nate] must resolve the contradiction between having his pick of women (and having a part of himself that would like to exploit this privilege) and knowing that if he just blithely sleeps with every one available to him, his values dictate that he must hate himself in the morning. “Men in New York—far outnumbered by women, and with time on their side—sometimes seem to hold all the cards,” is how The New Yorker’s Sasha Weiss describes Nate’s situation. To some extent, that is an unchangeable truism—indeed, as with all those 19th-century girls in trouble, it is partly rooted in biology itself, including gender-specific fertility clocks set at two different speeds. And it collides with the feminist mores of a liberal 21st-century city and, much more dramatically, with the feminist beliefs of this liberal 21st-century city-dweller.
What makes this predicament particularly tricky is its extremely personal nature. While bien-pensant liberals are horrified when the privileges men enjoy over women—or white people enjoy over people of color, or wealthy people enjoy over poor people—are abused in the aggregate, everyone tends to be a little more tolerant at the individual level, where the stakes are more personal, the power is more diffuse, and the rules are unwritten.
The Dish 