Brooklyn is hardly virgin territory for novels or short
stories; if anything, the borough bristles with fiction. There is, of course,
Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943),
and The Williamsburg Trilogy (1961),
by Daniel Fuchs. More recently, we have Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn (2009), which
portrays the borough as a port of call for an immigrant who instead of taking
the chartered path to life in America, however arduous, opts to go back home to
Ireland. Norman Mailer made Brooklyn part of his domestic and, in 1951′s Barbary Shore (admittedly not
his most memorable work) literary domain. The stories collected in Sam
Lipsyte’s The Fun Parts (2013), devise a lingo for the subcultures that have
sprung up in the chic, hothouse corners of the borough. Thomas Wolfe’s story Only The Dead Know Brooklyn (1925), makes a bold claim that is false on the
face of it, since it’s clear that Jonathan Lethem knows a few things about the
place, as he showed in Motherless Brooklyn (1999), Fortress of Solitude (2003),
and glancingly, in Dissident
Gardens (2013), which, strictly speaking, focuses more on Queens.
All this is by way of saying that as Brooklyn fictions go, Adelle Waldman’s novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. is a breed apart. In some ways, Waldman is more inspired by nineteenth-century London and environs than by twenty-first century New York City. It might seem flip, but is not entirely misleading to describe her novel as a yarn about the characters in Friends coming back with degrees in literature and jobs in publishing. They even meet up with Jane Austen in Prospect Park and the diners of Park Slope.
Waldman has made no secret of her debt to Austen. In an
essay for Slate.com (“I Read Everything Jane Austen Wrote, Several Times”), she
tells us that what she prizes about the author is that her characters are
“animated. . . by a sense of moral urgency,” and that Austen, “zeroes in,
showing us who and what is admirable, who is flawed but forgivable, who is
risible and who is truly vile.” Waldman has praised Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom
on similar grounds, preferring it to Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus because
it “is more humane, its authorial sympathies distributed more justly among its
characters.”
The moral urgency and the humane distribution of authorial
sympathy are evident everywhere in The Love Affair of Nathaniel P. They give
the novel its distinctive timbre and suspense, though not everything discussed
and scrutinized in Austenesque detail would get a hearing in nineteenth-century
literary fiction — certainly not the less than perfectly satisfying blow job
Nathaniel P. receives from his lover Hannah, which sends their relationship
into the final stages of its tailspin.
Nate, the book’s main character, is enjoying his first
success as a writer, having sold a soon-to-be-published novel, which gives him
considerable cachet in the demographic of which he is a part, a milieu of
aspiring writers and artists that “had expanded dramatically in a widening web
of faux-dives and mysteriously hip restaurants.” When he runs into Francesca,
for example, a “prettyish, stylish writer,” he now gets a warm hug, rather than
the distant nod of recognition which would have been his lot back when he
merely freelanced and proofread to stay afloat.
But Nate’s cachet has limits. At a Manhattan party, he runs
into a high school friend from Baltimore, now employed in investment banking. What
his success means to her comes down to, “she’d heard Brooklyn had gotten really
nice.”
Nate is the moral focal point for this new, really nice
Brooklyn; he’s Austen, channeled through Waldman into a Brooklyn literary
scene. Nate’s moral urgencies beset him on the subway when, after the whites
get off, the only ones left, so far as he can see, are the “overworked,
underpaid” blacks. They beset him when he goes to Whole Foods, which he
believes rewards shoppers, above and beyond the quality of produce, with “the
privilege of feeling ethically pure.”
Ethical qualms beset and afflict him most of all when it
comes to sex. He craves and enjoys it, but is rarely spared intense doubts
about his sexuality. “If only,” he reflects, “like those cock-swinging writers
of the last century — Mailer, Roth, et al — he could see the satisfaction of
his sexual desire as a triumph of spirit, the vital and needful assertion of a
giant, powerful virility whose essence was intellectual as well as erotic.” But
such unreserved satisfactions belong to a bygone heroic generation; when he,
Nate P. “squirt[s] his stuff” he hears and must contest with: “The dreary voice
of Kant” — Kant, no less, being categorically imperative about ejaculation in
Park Slope! — which insists he belabor the question of how and in what way it
was good for her, too, morally, even if she enjoyed it.
Adelle Waldman — In this book, she is more inspired by
nineteenth-century London and environs than by twenty-first century New York
City.
When Hannah gives Nate that less than perfect blowjob, she
notices his lack of pure satisfaction, and wants to know how she could have
performed better. “Hannah’s expression was meek and almost beatific in a kind
of nervous desire to please.” This submissiveness doesn’t endear her to him; if
anything it brings out Nate’s cruel streak. Nor, on the other hand, does Nate
have it in him to advise Hannah on how to properly “suck his balls first and to
please apply gentler more consistent pressure with her mouth and to go deeper
and, simultaneously, to flatten her tongue so it sort of cradled the seam as
she moved up and down his shaft.” Etc.
Waldman has the words for how Hannah might have perfected
fellatio but Nate can’t say them, subject as he is to his scruples, his
nastiness, his blowjob neo-Kantianism.
Waldman gives both Nate and Hannah room to move on and
mature, find others, and progress in their lives and their careers. Nate, for
example, finds contentment with Greer, for whom “writing was a way of
monetizing her charisma.” Being with Greer means “ground was ceded, claims
granted.” Nate becomes “supportive in certain required ways.” He had sometimes
achieved perfect rapport with Hannah, until that gave way to disappointments
and recriminations. He doesn’t demand perfect rapport with Greer; he
acknowledges differences and values her despite them. The conclusion of the
novel shows that Nate has matured.
This is a Brooklyn of rising literary tides, a Brooklyn not
even Thomas Wolfe could have imagined his dead imagining. But Waldman imagines
it and make it believable and compelling.
. . .
An afterthought: After posting the above it occurred to
me how thoroughly and exclusively the novel is concerned with coupling. There
is no allowance made in it for those who have chosen to remain single, and no
room for gay men and women, single or not. Much as I enjoyed the novel, it might be
that Adelle Waldman's devotion to Jane Austen narrowed its scope.
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