This curiously named novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. (no relation, thank goodness), concerns a 30-year-old Baltimorean become Brooklynite who drifts from bed to bed but is incapable of lasting love.
Adelle Waldman takes a scalpel to Nathaniel P[iven] and also to his various lady friends. Her analyses are sharp, incisive and sometimes painfully close to the bone. She is not above devoting paragraphs, even pages, to dissecting a minor event or brief conversation. Sometimes the intricacy of her observations resembles those of Henry James, though I can't remember The Master ever discussing either the scrotum or the anus of any of his characters. Waldman put me in mind of a sentence with which Horatio admonishes Hamlet: '"'twere to consider too curiously to consider so."
Reading this novel, I was relieved that I am not a 30-year-old on the hunt -- and that I never was. There's lots of sex, some of it precipitous, but not much discussion or examples of genuine intimacy. Waldman's landscape is unfamiliar to me -- a foreign culture or, rather, an alien civilization.
Set in Brooklyn, almost all the action takes place in Williamsburg or environs, certainly within sight of the Manhattan skyline -- although I remember that once or twice characters may have ventured into the Brooklyn hinterland for a pizza.
The author is amusingly aware of the way the new Brooklyn has superseded the old:
the two groups (i.e. older residents and newcomers) might have existed on different layers of the earth's atmosphere that only from a distance appear to be on the same plane. A store called National Wines & Liquors, Inc, where both liquor and cashier were enclosed behind bulletproof glass, was not actually a competitor to the much newer Tangled Vine, which specialized in organic and local wines and exhibited the work of area artists at its Thursday-evening tastings.
Which reminds me that I started to read but failed to comprehend a novel called Class (2014) by Francesco Pacifico in which Williamsburg was regularly referred to as "Willy." Again, I ask, what would Daniel Fuchs think?
The more of these novels I read, the more Brooklyn seems like a multiply layered palimpsest -- one culture imposed upon another, generation after generation. My own Flatbush neighborhood, now upgraded to "Kensington," was farmland right through to the end of the 19th century, then a suburb for prosperous old Protestant families, next a haven for Irish, Italian and Jewish immigrants and now an ethnic stew of Hasids, Turks, Arabs, Russians, and South and Central Americans of all kinds but also with an strong admixture of Tangled Vine dinks, yuppies and midWestern computer geeks. It's a complex piece of urban Americana -- one facet of which is well-illustrated by the story of unhappy Nathaniel P.
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