The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. - Adelle Waldman (2013)

I was on a doc review project in the Willis Tower for about six weeks in May and June of 2014. Now we are always told by doc review agencies never to browse the web while we are working. I find it hard to believe that anyone actually follows this rule. On a previous project I was paid $16.50 an hour, and for that, I felt it was my duty to browse as often as possible. This recent one paid a fair rate of $25.00 (some still believe that fair is $30) so I was more wary of that rule. I indulged in reading a fair number of book reviews, among other things (but this post isn't a special comment about the vaguely disregarded notion of web browsing at work), and found the book reviews done by Entertainment Weekly to be fun, because they give everything a grade. The reviews themselves cannot hold a candle to what I do here (they are too short and limited in scope) but they seem to have a unified concept of what makes for good literature. (The only “A+” review I saw was for Building Stories by Chris Ware, and truly that looks like an A+ “book.”) 

Naturally, I wanted to see if I had "gotten in right” with The Circle. They gave it a B+, which is about what I would give it, and they said it was “about fifty pages too long,” which I basically implied. Intriguingly, they gave The Goldfinch a B-, which heartened me some, though now I feel obligated to read it. I kept looking through 2013 reviews, vaguely hoping that I would find the book I was currently reading. And there it was! Apparently The Love of Affairs of Nathaniel P. was a big enough deal at the time of publication that EW ran a review of it. Almost a year ago, they gave it a B-. Strangely, they seem to indicate that it’s pretty well-written, but there’s nothing revelatory about it. While I agree to a certain extent, I would have to say it is better than a B-. I would give it a B+. I would say it is not quite as good as Taipei, but was a good “companion piece” to it, as my review of that book led to this recommendation.

Before I get into the plot (which is super easy to tell), I considered this book something of a challenge. I have had a problem in finding female writers that I enjoy. Edith Wharton is one of my all-time favorites, but there just haven’t been many others that have moved me. I can’t pin this down because I don’t want to sound like a misogynist, but I’m afraid it’s inevitable. The challenge for me was to read this book and see if I called “bullshit” on it with regard to the depiction of how men view relationships. I could not do that. This book is better than that. I am sure that there is plenty of “chick-lit” that could get me really pissed off, but this book did not make me throw it down in anger and shout, “You’re wrong about us!”

Nathaniel P., always referred to as Nate, is a writer in Brooklyn who has just gotten an advance for his first book, which is loosely based on his parents’ experience of living as immigrants in the U.S. We first see him run into an ex-girlfriend, Juliet, on the street. She had needed to get an abortion and Nate paid for it. He never really talked to her again after he paid for it, and she is clearly upset over this. He then goes to a party at the home of another ex-girlfriend, Elisa. There he meets Hannah, whom he will eventually date. Their relationship comprises the bulk of the novel’s 242 pages. Along the way, Nate circles back to reflect on growing up, and the girls he liked in high school and college. He eventually gets “serious” with Kristen in college, and lives with her for three years. However that ends because they began “drifting apart” while she went to med school. Eventually, he moves to New York and somehow makes a living as a writer. This is the first and only part that I call “bullshit” on. Ostensibly Nate works a temp job that becomes full-time, indefinitely termed, to pay the rent before any income from his writing emerges. Honestly I do not believe this is realistic. Or rather, while I do think that type of job could cover a person’s costs in NYC, the next paragraph is what I find unrealistic:

“Looking back, he was proud that he’d ‘persevered,’ by which he meant that he hadn't gone to law school. He’d moved to a cheaper apartment, which allowed him to quit the private equity job in favor of shorter bouts of temp work and freelance proofreading for a law firm. He worked on fiction and pitched articles and book reviews, getting assignments here and there. His critical voice improved. He began to get more assignments. Toward the end of his twenties, it became evident that he’d managed to cobble together an actual career as a freelance writer. The achievement was capped off when a major online magazine offered him a position as its regular book reviewer.” (34)

Now, I am sure some people can make it work as a freelancer, but can they afford an apartment they do not share? I doubt it. Hannah is also a freelancer and similarly lives alone in a pretty nice area in Brooklyn (Prospect Heights?). I never tried to be a freelancer and maybe I regret it after reading this book? I didn’t persevere. Aside from my nit-picky demand for “economic reality,” I can’t complain about much else. This book is very well-written, and it’s just subtle enough to appear true-to-life. I remember one particular observation about intellectual tastes at Harvard that seemed so obscure that it had to be true:

 “Growing up, Nate discussed current events at the dinner table; as a family, they watched 60 Minutes and Jeopardy! Apparently, though, some parents read the New York Review of Books and drank martinis. In time, Nate would learn to make finer distinctions between the homes of his most sophisticated classmates—the old-school WASPs versus the academic intellectuals (Jew or gentile)—but in the first weeks of college it seemed to him that all of them, from the children of well-known leftist firebrands to the spawn of union-busting industrial titans, spoke the same language. It seemed that way because they did. (Many of them had gone to the same prep schools.) When it came right down to it, these groups were like the Capulets and the Montagues. Whatever their differences, they were both wealthy Veronese families. Nate’s family was from Romania.” (24)

Maybe that wasn’t the exact quote I was looking for, but it’s close enough and illustrates the point: Waldman is very articulate when it comes to the characteristics of the people she writes about, skirting a fine line between stereotype and fully-realized human being. That is to say, these characters are not stereotypes, and though sometimes they come very close to looking like one, Waldman is effectively writing about a stereotypical cadre of artists in Brooklyn. Nate himself is certainly given a thorough psychological profile. Most of the time it seems like he is the type of guy that most girls would call an “asshole,” but he doesn't come across as a bad guy in the typical sense of boyfriend-material. He is just passive aggressive and doesn't always say what’s on his mind, and Hannah notices this, and calls him out on it. Some of these scenes are great in their intensity—but on the other hand, the actual “incidents” that lead to a fight are petty. This is really where the novel hits hardest. Dating is all about trying to find “the one” that you can share the rest of your life with, and the process of figuring out what you want out of life. Hannah knows this, and she teaches Nate to understand that.

The other characters are a lot more interesting than Nate or Hannah. Nate and Hannah are both perfectly likable but almost stock characters. Aurit, to name the most obvious example, is probably the most interesting character in the book, with Jason taking second. Apparently Waldman wrote an “addendum short story” to this novel that is written from the perspective of Aurit. She is Nate’s closest female friend—pretty much a hardcore feminist, but again, not in the stereotypical sense—and he places much of his intellectual faith in her. Jason is like the character the reader may imagine Nate to be after looking at the cover of the book and reading the jacket description. Okay, maybe both Nate and Jason are assholes, but I think it’s clear that Jason is the more offensive of the two—and again, not stereotypically. Some of his philosophical pronouncements are insane, but I find value in at least some of them:

“Nate pressed his palms against the tabletop.
‘You aren’t arguing that the problem is that we don’t really have one—but that meritocracy itself is bad?’ Jason nodded enthusiastically. ‘Fairness in a meritocracy is just homage to exceptional talent. For the unexceptional—by definition, the bulk of people—meritocracy is a crueler system than what it replaced.’ ‘Than slavery? Feudalism?’
‘For every Jude the Obscure,’ Jason continued over him, ‘prevented by a hereditary class system from going to Oxford, there are a thousand other stonemasons who lack Jude’s intelligence. Meritocracy is great for guys like Jude, who had talent. For the others, it’s bad news.’
‘Wait,’ Nate said. ‘How are the other masons injured if Jude gets to go to Oxford? Is this like how straight marriage is injured by allowing gay marriage? Because I don’t get that either.’
‘They’re exposed as lacking. Duh.’ Jason shook his head. ‘If everyone remains in the station he’s born to, there’s no shame in it, but if it’s in one’s power to rise, the failure to do so becomes a personal failure.’” (213)

One other criticism I wanted to make, and this one will probably be insane, but I have to say it: the novel lacks any sort of struggle with sexuality. Clearly a person like Nate, who knows he is straight and who has slept with his fair number of women but has trouble building lasting relationships with them, would at least wonder if he might be gay or bi. This would have made the novel a lot more interesting, but unfortunately it is unpalatable for people to believe that people are not just born gay or straight. It wouldn't even need to be a whole chapter in the novel—a few paragraphs would do. To be a complete and true psychological profile, at least a cursory reference to this issue should be made.
***

While we are on the topic of other things this book should have done, it also appears unrealistic in that Nate does not really even consider online dating. At one point there is a brief narrative involving girls he met when he first moved to New York, that he would meet in public places (like subway trains). However he decides that the easiest way to meet them is through publishing parties. Maybe there are lots of attractive single women in the publishing industry, but I don’t think so. The “reality” of my experience has shown that once you hit your thirties, it is really hard to meet someone that isn't damaged goods or way younger. I think with guys it is different, but I know very few girls my age that are not yet engaged or married or living with their significant other, their careers in a good place and a plan for a bouncing baby a few years down the line already in place. Of course, such a cynical book might become tiresome, and while I do believe that great literature should reflect "reality," any book that is almost exclusively about “the dating scene” (as this one is) should probably be a little bit romantic, if only to give the inevitable lonely reader hope that they will not be doomed to a loveless existence. I've kind of gone on a tangent here, but what I mean is, Nate doesn't seem like the most outgoing guy in the world, and would ostensibly at least dabble, or go on one date with a girl he met online. But to return to the tangent, there are at least signs that Waldman acknowledges “reality” as I know it:

“When he was twenty-five, everywhere he turned he saw a woman who already had, or else didn’t want, a boyfriend. Some were taking breaks from men to give women or celibacy a try. Others were busy applying to grad school, or planning yearlong trips to Indian ashrams, or touring the country with their all-girl rock bands. The ones who had boyfriends were careless about the relationships and seemed to cheat frequently (which occasionally worked in his favor). But in his thirties everything was different. The world seemed populated, to an alarming degree, by women whose careers, whether soaring or sputtering along, no longer preoccupied them. No matter what they claimed, they seemed, in practice, to care about little except relationships.” (40-41)

One of the blurbs on the back of the book compares this book to High Fidelity, and I have to agree that they are quite similar. However, High Fidelity is also about music and I found it to be a much better book overall. Maybe my opinion of that book is colored by my feelings on the film, which I think is one of the most successful adaptations I’ve seen (I saw the movie first—didn’t like it that much when I was 17—liked it much better after reading the book). So I can’t give this book an “A.” Still, for a first novel, it is quite good. The writing is sharp, and a lot of readers will be able to identify with the depictions of the psychological warfare that longer-term relationships almost always engender. Minor quibbles to the side, I would recommend this book and thank the anonymous reader that suggested it to me. I do think a better book on the subject could be written, but it would also be difficult to craft something as satisfying.

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby

A Long Way Down is a recent novel by Nick Hornby (published in 2005, if memory serves) which I read roughly five months ago. Of Hornby's oeuvre, I have read High Fidelity and Songbook. No About a Boy, no How to be Good, no Fever Pitch, et al. It is perhaps worth noting that Hornby achieves what, to my mind, is the greatest contribution a novelist can make to a society at this odd juncture of superfluous entertainment options. That is, to coin a phrase recognizable to a mass segment of the population: Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music? The other achievement of course, is that Hornby's books enjoy a very high percentage of film adaptation, most of which are generally approved by audiences. High Fidelity is of course his biggest hit to date, and the film version certainly added a lot of mileage by bringing in John Cusack and switching the city from London to Chicago. About a Boy and Fever Pitch had films made out of them to slightly lesser degrees of success, but the fact remains Nick Hornby is certainly in the Top 5 Novelists in their Prime in 2008.

I bought A Long Way Down from Borders because it was part of a Buy 1, Get 1 50% off deal but it was not necessarily a waste of money. I also bought it for egotistical reasons. Immediately upon reading the description, I realized that Hornby's novel was extremely similar to my first novel, and I had to read it to see how he made it work. Someone famous like him could certainly give me some pointers in the way of getting published. He read in L.A. last October 26 or so, and I wanted to interview him afterwards to ask him about these sorts of things, but I did nothing that night instead.

The novel concerns four characters--Maureen, Jessica, J.J., and Martin--who accidentally meet each other on New Year's Eve on the top of a building. Each of them planned to commit suicide. Maureen has an invalid son that she must constantly attend to, denying her much of any social life, as she wades through her early fifties. Jessica is an 18 year old girl who has recently broken up with her boyfriend and who generally, amongst all the characters, is the stupidest and most annoying. J.J. is a 27 year old American musician who moved to London to be with his girlfriend, who recently broke up with him, and likewise his band, and is now delivering pizza. Martin is a formerly successful ex-host of a TV show like Regis & Kelly in his mid-forties who slept with a 15 year old girl, ruining his marriage, family and career.

Each of them wants to die, but they keep each other from doing it, and they have a variety of adventures as a "foursome," most notably when Jessica claims they didn't jump because they saw an angel, and then all three others have to lie and agree with her so the tabloid story holds water.

The problem with the novel is the same problem with my first novel--it floats around aimlessly, content to record the characters' witty asides instead of finding a proper resolution for the narrative. I did like the ending, however, because it refused to make any concrete declarations about the futures of these characters. The characters do go through changes though--Maureen lives a little more and grows to appreciate the little things, Jessica begins to act slightly more grown up, J.J. makes amends with his girlfriend and his best friend/bandmate, and Martin even sees his ex-wife and daughters and begins a difficult climb back to respectability.

What is most endearing about the novel is the way the characters latch onto one another and become friends and support one another through their life's obstacles, as trivial as they may sometimes be. At times it seems as if they are having fun, but usually they are really just trying to make sense of why they wanted to kill themselves, whether their life is really worth living or not, and what they are going to do now that they are still alive.

While High Fidelity may be about as perfect a modern novel as there is, A Long Way Down attempts a more experimental, almost philosophical, story, and in return loses a certain charm. One criticism of my first novel is that many people do not know which character to care about (there are 10). That is one similar thing I could say about this. I want to care about all of them, but I end up caring most about Martin, to be honest. Maureen also, is very sweet, but J.J. and Jessica are both young and their issues seem more trivial somehow, though one knows from experience that their problems are probably just as psychically traumatizing. It is much easier to care about Rob in High Fidelity than any single character in this novel, because there is a definite plot to his life. In a plotless atmosphere, Hornby attempts to diagnose modern depression and define the suicidal impulse, an admirable goal for a novel. However, one feels it might have been more effective to have focused on a single character, rather than four, but I am sure the ensuing adaptation (one can only assume...) will be highly entertaining and more original than 90% of the fare Hollywood shovels out in 2010.