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3.18 AVERAGE
3.18 AVERAGE
Holy shit. Holy shit. Holy shit.
I am Hannah, so of course I loved this book and over-related to it like woah. I would be curious to see how the men she's critiquing feel about it, though.
I am Hannah, so of course I loved this book and over-related to it like woah. I would be curious to see how the men she's critiquing feel about it, though.
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This is what happens in Nathaniel P. : our acerbic narrator, Nate, dates a girl for a few months, and has many quibbling and tiresome "academic" fights with friends he doesn't seem to like very much. That's it. You think maybe you'll go back in time to revisit his past relationships, go over how he met them, what he learned from each girl. But apart from the occasional afternoon musing about an ex, you don't get to really hear about anybody but Nate.
And Nate is jerk (something more than a jerk, but I'm censoring it for goodreads). A really boring jerk.
I literally like every single other character better than Nate. And a lot of the other characters suck.
Let's go back up to that synopsis briefly. Nate is supposedly a "sensitive, modern man." Which is completely untrue. He's not sensitive in the least. He disparages all women in his life, painfully agonizes over mundane, archaic things about dating, women, relationships, none of which is new. Even worse is the thought that this book "reveals one particular (though also alarmingly familiar) young man’s thoughts about women and love." Which is technically true, only because it will be familiar to any woman who has ever dated a womanizing prick. Why is all this lauded as positive?! Without reading the book it might sound promising. After reading Love Affairs , it just points out what a terrible person and character Nate is.
So Nate spends 70% of the book trying to make his whinings about dating and relationships seem valid and worthwhile. The other 30% of the book is Nate interacting with friends at various restaurants or parties, and ALWAYS getting into random arguments about random philosophical/psychological/political topics they may or may not write articles about to sell for freelance gigs. Such as the export of labor as the height of capitalism. Or obesity. Or book reviews.
And seeing as there's no reason for me to care about these arguments: no common ground is struck, no argument is returned to or becomes a major plot point, and no one is ever in any danger of losing a gig or even suffering for money for some reason (probably because they all seem to have written a book for a huge advance - the plots and characters of which are treated as unimportant, inconsequential).
There's nothing for me to care about here. No actively stimulating plot. No stakes. Nate is a sexist, boring jerk who thinks he is Someone Important. Women tend to like him (who knows why), but he's bad at dating, he's selfish, and apart from his jerk-ness, doesn't have anything interesting going for him. I don't care is he gets a happy ending. Or even an unhappy ending. I would not recommend Nate or his boring, boorish story.
This is what happens in Nathaniel P. : our acerbic narrator, Nate, dates a girl for a few months, and has many quibbling and tiresome "academic" fights with friends he doesn't seem to like very much. That's it. You think maybe you'll go back in time to revisit his past relationships, go over how he met them, what he learned from each girl. But apart from the occasional afternoon musing about an ex, you don't get to really hear about anybody but Nate.
And Nate is jerk (something more than a jerk, but I'm censoring it for goodreads). A really boring jerk.
I literally like every single other character better than Nate. And a lot of the other characters suck.
Let's go back up to that synopsis briefly. Nate is supposedly a "sensitive, modern man." Which is completely untrue. He's not sensitive in the least. He disparages all women in his life, painfully agonizes over mundane, archaic things about dating, women, relationships, none of which is new. Even worse is the thought that this book "reveals one particular (though also alarmingly familiar) young man’s thoughts about women and love." Which is technically true, only because it will be familiar to any woman who has ever dated a womanizing prick. Why is all this lauded as positive?! Without reading the book it might sound promising. After reading Love Affairs , it just points out what a terrible person and character Nate is.
So Nate spends 70% of the book trying to make his whinings about dating and relationships seem valid and worthwhile. The other 30% of the book is Nate interacting with friends at various restaurants or parties, and ALWAYS getting into random arguments about random philosophical/psychological/political topics they may or may not write articles about to sell for freelance gigs. Such as the export of labor as the height of capitalism. Or obesity. Or book reviews.
And seeing as there's no reason for me to care about these arguments: no common ground is struck, no argument is returned to or becomes a major plot point, and no one is ever in any danger of losing a gig or even suffering for money for some reason (probably because they all seem to have written a book for a huge advance - the plots and characters of which are treated as unimportant, inconsequential).
There's nothing for me to care about here. No actively stimulating plot. No stakes. Nate is a sexist, boring jerk who thinks he is Someone Important. Women tend to like him (who knows why), but he's bad at dating, he's selfish, and apart from his jerk-ness, doesn't have anything interesting going for him. I don't care is he gets a happy ending. Or even an unhappy ending. I would not recommend Nate or his boring, boorish story.
This was a little painful. Nate goes onto a list of worst protagonists of all time.
I hated the main character so much that it was hard for me to finish the book.
I kind of really loved this, slash felt deeply uncomfortable about how accurately it depicted things in my life, or in lives only one or two degrees removed from mine...which is I guess what every single review I've seen says...probably because every single review I've seen is written by someone one or two degrees removed from my life...
Someone who doesn't live in Brooklyn/didn't work in publishing needs to tell me what they think of it!
Someone who doesn't live in Brooklyn/didn't work in publishing needs to tell me what they think of it!
Ugh I love-hate this book so hard but it's so well done. I don't want it to be real but it's SO REAL ugh fuck everything.
This book is so well-known that I don’t think I have much to add. Anyway, I sped my way through it. Not because it was bad—I actually found it amusing. Nate is really quite the douchebag, but the amusing part is that he suspects he is too. But then he sits down to eat his Raisin Bran and plan the next Great American Novel.
I'm still thinking about this one...
I already want to re-read it.
I already want to re-read it.
Great. It was particularly welcome to me because I've recently decided to stop "reading white-male-Brooklyn-writer's problem" books, and to me, this read as an incisive, and funny, critique of that genre.
There are a lot of asshole white male narrators in literature. The Catcher in the Rye, The Secret History, This Side of Paradise. It might take readers a full read-through or more before the asshole-ishness becomes apparent, if it ever does (In how many high school classrooms is Holden Caulfield’s alarming misogyny genuinely explored, or even brought up?). The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., however, doesn’t beat around the bush. “You’re an asshole,” says one woman to Nathaniel on page 8, and there’s no refutation provided.
Nathaniel is a Harvard-graduate-son-of-immigrants who’s worked his butt off as a freelance writer for years and has just been granted a six-figure advance for his first novel. Also, he’s sexist. He posits that, while “women [are] every bit as intelligent as men,” women are just a little less interested in exploring the rational, the worthy, the interesting. They’re less likely to be intellectuals. He would read books by women – but it’s just that for a long time women didn’t write as much as men, couldn’t write as much as men, and today, if he admires something he reads, “there [is] about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.”
In 1432 Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect of the Italian Renaissance, wrote a book called On the Family. In it he listed the expectations any man should have when choosing a wife: That the woman be young, beautiful, fertile, support him throughout his career, and care for his children. Men, meanwhile, were to go out into the world and pursue their creative lives.
It’s an idea that’s existed for a long time and won’t be washed away for a long time more. Adelle Waldman explores the dynamics between gender and art, ambition and romance, as they apply to the elites of modern day New York.
There are books that explore this less directly that Waldman’s. It’s not clumsiness that made Waldman skip the subtlety, but rather a recognition that this topic deserves a full-on examination. She shines a light on our relationships to pornography, feminism, pop culture, and each other. The conclusions she draws are both daunting and real.
She takes a little over two hundred pages to explore the question of why intelligent, accomplished men end up with beautiful but incompatible women. It’s a predictable trend, baffling but true - Waldman, however, zaps it of its mystery: Maybe hysterical women are desirable because by comparison a man becomes “beautifully, effortlessly right.” Maybe that constant assurance that “he [is] reasonable, far more reasonable than she [is],” will make a man “happier, more productive, less distracted by loneliness and horniness” than if he were dating a woman who was his equal, who was working hard in the other room and didn’t want to be disturbed - didn’t have time to reassure his fragile, masculine ego.
I enjoyed the book and was left slightly queasy over the qualities of Nathaniel P. that I can find in my male friends, my female friends – and myself.
Nathaniel is a Harvard-graduate-son-of-immigrants who’s worked his butt off as a freelance writer for years and has just been granted a six-figure advance for his first novel. Also, he’s sexist. He posits that, while “women [are] every bit as intelligent as men,” women are just a little less interested in exploring the rational, the worthy, the interesting. They’re less likely to be intellectuals. He would read books by women – but it’s just that for a long time women didn’t write as much as men, couldn’t write as much as men, and today, if he admires something he reads, “there [is] about an 80 percent chance that a guy wrote it.”
In 1432 Leon Battista Alberti, the great architect of the Italian Renaissance, wrote a book called On the Family. In it he listed the expectations any man should have when choosing a wife: That the woman be young, beautiful, fertile, support him throughout his career, and care for his children. Men, meanwhile, were to go out into the world and pursue their creative lives.
It’s an idea that’s existed for a long time and won’t be washed away for a long time more. Adelle Waldman explores the dynamics between gender and art, ambition and romance, as they apply to the elites of modern day New York.
There are books that explore this less directly that Waldman’s. It’s not clumsiness that made Waldman skip the subtlety, but rather a recognition that this topic deserves a full-on examination. She shines a light on our relationships to pornography, feminism, pop culture, and each other. The conclusions she draws are both daunting and real.
She takes a little over two hundred pages to explore the question of why intelligent, accomplished men end up with beautiful but incompatible women. It’s a predictable trend, baffling but true - Waldman, however, zaps it of its mystery: Maybe hysterical women are desirable because by comparison a man becomes “beautifully, effortlessly right.” Maybe that constant assurance that “he [is] reasonable, far more reasonable than she [is],” will make a man “happier, more productive, less distracted by loneliness and horniness” than if he were dating a woman who was his equal, who was working hard in the other room and didn’t want to be disturbed - didn’t have time to reassure his fragile, masculine ego.
I enjoyed the book and was left slightly queasy over the qualities of Nathaniel P. that I can find in my male friends, my female friends – and myself.