Your purchase helps support NPR programming. The main target of her gimlet eye is not men it is the very narrow population among whom Nate (and Waldman) (and I) reside: economically privileged, liberal-minded, well-educated, mostly white writers and editors living in gentrifying Brooklyn.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Unlike Nate, Waldman is smart enough to avoid making generalizations about either sex. It would be just as easy to come away from the novel disillusioned with women as disillusioned with men-but if you do either, you’re missing the point.
Nate and his various girlfriends-most notably Hannah, the “nice and smart” fellow writer whose five-month relationship with Nate the novel spans-are alternately likeable and baffling, sympathetic and infuriating. She holds her cards rather close to her chest, actually. The gender discrepancy between Nathaniel P.’s author and its protagonist is perhaps the seventh or eighth most interesting thing about the novel, and Waldman seems to be making no bets about the perspective or prejudices of her audience. Men used to justify their behavior by admitting to their contempt of women what’s Nate’s justification?īoth of these assumptions are wrong. But he has far less clarity when it comes to his personal life-he benefits from contemporary sexual mores, but he hates thinking about how they hurt other people (especially the women he sleeps with).
He sees the way he benefits from contemporary capitalism, understands how it hurts other people, and feels bad about it. Nate is at least conscious of his economic hypocrisy, but he is for the most part blissfully ignorant of his sexual hypocrisy. Nate, Waldman’s novel suggests, is one of the morally squeamish elites he derides-and in more ways than one. People back then at least justified their behavior by admitting to their contempt for the poor.” We’ve just gotten better at hiding it-from ourselves most of all. “You know how you read a Dickens novel where these eight-year-old boys work in factories or beg on the streets? And you wonder why didn’t anyone give a fuck? Well, we aren’t so different.
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