Sordid Scenes

On the Vagaries of Ambition and Writing

Dear Republic,

All readers have a book—or author—they treasure in particular. Our series this week focuses on those special relationships. I’m kicking us off with Adelle Waldman’s The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. Some books are enchanting because they’re well-written, others for the allure of the places they describe; I find Love Affairs to be both.

- Greta

SORDID SCENES

Reading about other writers is my guiltiest and least productive pleasure. The fugitive bolt of recognition is exactly what I’m after—who the author is, what kind of life they fashioned for themselves, how they did it.

This is in large part why I read, and re-read, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. I came across the novel in a post by Ross Barkan about bohemianism, the intellectual scene in New York City, and the sense of glamour that sustained these self-serious young men and women. Written by Adelle Waldman, Love Affairs follows Nate, a late-twenties writer in Brooklyn who’s on the rise after having sold his first novel. The story is full of details that never seem to be fleshed out in magazine pieces and Wikipedia bios—the intricacies of Nate’s social milieu, his well-exercised set of attitudes and neuroses, the mood and texture of his life. Love Affairs tries to answer: what does it mean to be a writer? What shape does your life take? How do you avoid becoming an obnoxious and self-serious person in the process?

Love Affairs is illuminating on the vagaries of an intellectual scene. “It’s more complicated than I thought, the whole thing—ambition and writing,’” Nate confesses on a date. “‘More sordid.’” Nate is loosely based on a set of Brooklyn writers from the early 2010s. Like the founders of n+1, who Daniel Oppenheimer credited with “creat[ing] a scene and a conversation around it” in the early 2010s, Nate goes to readings, gets drinks with his critic buddies, and holds forth on politics, culture, and the life of the mind. In his post, Barkan wrote that the book was a relic from a time when a “certain kind of literary prestige still very much mattered.”

The snatches of life at the center of this elegized literary set are alluring—Nate’s bohemian triumph in his “squalid little apartment,” a home of “a person who lived for things other than the sort of domestic and domesticating coziness that almost everybody seemed to go in for,” the treasured window over his desk where he “breath[es] in mouthfuls of moist air” while writing. Nate’s life has its own romantic gravity—like all great works of art, Love Affairs glows with its own aura—but for all this pull, the novel is less satisfied with Nate than he is with himself, and reserves its judgement for the final page.

As the title suggests, Nate’s dating life is the primary concern of Love Affairs. Fresh off a book deal, Nate’s sense of his intellect and powers of observation are at their peak, but in the murkier terrain of relationships, he’s often mystified by his own actions. He is torn between being “attracted to and repelled by” women, who “force him into contact with their least attractive aspects,” the “cesspools of need, the pockets of self-pity, the most vain and ugly of [their] thoughts” that “remain largely hidden” in his relationships with male friends.

As in Emma, where, as Henry Oliver wrote, “we only see what [the protagonist] herself sees, rather than seeing the whole truth,” Love Affairs dramatizes the gulf between the person Nate thinks himself to be and the person he is revealed to be. Nate’s position in the external world of literary status is firm, but his understanding of himself is disperse, leaping into clear definition only in the contrast of his peers. (“He didn’t like the idea of dating girls Jason wouldn’t. That seemed wrong, since Nate was clearly the better person—more successful as well as more deserving.”)

Waldman shares Austen’s belief in the virtue of honest sight, and the danger for Nate is to be carried by the force of his ego out to waters where he can no longer rightly perceive himself and the world around him.

Love Affairs’ mode of narration underscores the primacy of perception. Rather than simply inhabiting Nate’s perspective, we are privy to the buried judgements and feelings that barely graze the register of his conscious narration:

It flashed through Nate’s mind that Hannah’s position wasn’t very feminine. She sounded more like an aesthete than an educator, and women, in his experience, tended by disposition to be educators. He felt intuitively that she was paraphrasing someone else (a professor? Nabokov’s Lectures on Literature?) and that the someone was a man.

Nate, like any writer, is sharply observant. But his observations are deployed to further some judgement that Nate imagines to have been innocently metabolized from the external world. His first girlfriend, he cooly evaluates, is “in the world’s crude judgment, a catch… several notches above him in the college social hierarchy.”

We thus are given to understand Nate better than he understands himself. As one thread, accessible to Nate, develops—his relationship with fellow writer Hannah—another portrait is assembling beyond the frame of his perception: that of a man straining against the tide of an accumulating set of discomforts he can’t quite muster the strength to face.

Just as Emma, reproached by Mr. Knightley for her meddling, “tried to look cheerfully unconcerned, but was really feeling uncomfortable wanting him very much to be gone,” so too does Nate writhe under the acute thumb of discomfort, lashing out petulantly. Too squeamish to talk with Hannah about their sex life, Nate mulls:

He’d never particularly liked her bedroom. She had one of those big, freestanding wooden mirrors, draped with scarves and belts and other feminine things, from which wafted all sorts of artificial floral vapors. … It almost too neatly embodied so much that was unattractive about women: mustiness, materialism, clutter.

Nate’s dogged sexism is a place of solace: a habitual retreat to the immutable difference of sex. Emma seeks a similar consolation after Mr. Knightley upbraids her matchmaking, claiming feminine wisdom beyond his reprove: “she thought herself a better judge of such a point of female right and refinement.”

The challenge for Nate, and for Emma, is to shed flattering or convenient perceptions of themselves in order to mature and find companionship. In Love Affairs, Hannah emerges as Nate’s opportunity to do so. Hannah is shown to be Nate’s intellectual equal—she can catch Nate out, as no one else is shown to do:

He didn’t mean to insult her friend. He was talking on a macro level.

Oh, a macro level,” Hannah said. “I see then.”

Nate was immediately embarrassed. Why had he used that word?

But Nate is too clever for his own good. Though initially energized by their mutual understanding, he is more often put off by Hannah’s deviations from “femininity” than interested in apprehending her as a peer.

Nate, steeped not only in Marxism and feminism but also pop-psychology, has a penchant for giving himself a break—for telling himself not to overthink it as he is nerdily wont to do—just at the moment the benefit of his moral deliberation would be most acute. Instead, his method of reflection involves refracting a situation through a kaleidoscope of social theory—though the verdict tends to acquit him:

Most of the time, Nate quieted the fundamentalist preacher’s voice in his head. It was not to be trusted—it was simplistic, it was self-aggrandizing, according him a godlike power over others; it assumed, problematically, that he was smarter and stronger than Elisa and thus solely responsible for everything that happened between them…

In Austen novels, love is a formative experience. To meet it fully requires courage and the willingness to change. Mr. Knightley, in his confession of love to Emma, praises her capacity to face difficult criticism: “You hear nothing but the truth from me. I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.” In contrast, Nate shrinks from Hannah, blowing her off until she calls the relationship quits. In hindsight, Nate recognizes that “He and Hannah had related on levels that he and [his new girlfriend] didn’t,” but about the revelation, all Nate has to say is that it is “not… a comfortable thought.”

Despite this murmur of discomfort, Nate seems to have turned out pretty well. He likes his new girlfriend. He’s “pleased with his progress on the new book; perhaps that was, for him, more important than anything else.” Love Affairs tempers this equanimity.

On the eve of moving in with his new girlfriend, Nate runs into Hannah at a party. Though she leaves the conversation quickly, Nate turns over the interaction all night, and finds himself composing a late-night email to her. But something—some note of diffidence—causes him to cast it aside. He closes his computer, and falls asleep.

The final sentences of the novel leave Nate behind. Love Affairs lingers over what he has forgotten:

In a few days, it would be as if this night had never happened, the only evidence of it an unsent e-mail automatically saved to his drafts folder. (”Dear Hannah...”) He’d no more remember the pain—or the pleasure—of this moment than he would remember, once he moved into the new apartment, the exact scent of the air from his bedroom window at dawn, after he’d been up all night working.

Though Nate will perhaps never realize it, we see that the thing that he has lost with Hannah is bound up with the quiet rapture of his writing. He has lost his ability to face himself honestly, and though he is “pleased” with his book, we suspect some other, clearer vision has been waylaid. It may be lost forever.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P may have lifted Nate’s complexities from the main character in Keith Gessen’s All the Sad Young Literary Men, published five years earlier. After spending the night carousing with a washed-up writer, the main character laments:

I wanted badly to cry… I suddenly knew that Morris’s life was a very likely life, the sort of life one could end up having, if one was not very careful, and I knew, already, in addition to knowing that I was neither mediocrity nor genius, that I was not very careful at all.

Nate is a warning to be careful. Substack is full of writers with genuinely unique perspectives and writing styles. The layers of interaction on the site are compelling—a reminder that writers are just regular people, who work at an attainable and emulable thing. But the sordidness of the undertaking as portrayed in Love Affairs—ideas and thinking as a “fashion,” an obsession with status that turns women into tokens, and the demonstration again and again that, as Helen DeWitt writes in The Last Samurai, “clever men so seldom need to think,” makes me wary.

As much as I agree with Henry Begler —I also want to be there—I wonder if the excitement around a “scene” is a bit like a clamor for a hierarchy of competition and desirability. Everyone wants their writing to matter, and to talk about it and care about it with people—but isn’t that too easily lowered into the desire to feel like we’re important, and that we matter? Vanity and ego drown out clear thinking, and therefore good writing. As a sustaining drive, they are too easily rebutted by reality, and curdle into bitterness.

That spectre of bitterness and disillusionment can seem to loom mightily. The instincts toward comparison are unlikely to lessen in the future. The challenge, then, is to avoid becoming Nate: to not let our sets of insecurities become limitations.

The only thing that matters, bound inevitably up in the relationships and texture of life, is the deliverance of the work. As in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P’s evaporating conclusion: the fleeting scent of air from a bedroom window, at dawn.