What do men want? Adelle Waldman addresses this question in her first novel, “The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.†Nate is an aspiring writer in Brooklyn, and Ms. Waldman writes from his perspective, closely exploring his conscious and unconscious habits in relating to women. In The New York Times Book Review, Jess Walter called the novel “a smart, engaging 21st-century comedy of manners.†In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Waldman discussed how she got inside Nate’s head, whether readers should dislike him, her literary influences and more. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation:
What appealed to you about writing from so firmly inside a man’s head? Was it just another character you wanted to get to the bottom of, or was there a conscious feeling that this would be provocative in a useful way?
I had a years-old desire to write about certain experiences that I had had in romantic relationships, which over time I realized were similar to the experiences of other women. Many women I knew struggled to make sense of men we were involved with who were by no means wholly bad people â€" and who were often very talented and charming in other respects â€" but whose behavior in a romantic context seemed both unpredictable and hurtful. As widespread as this experience seemed to be among women, I didn’t really see it well-represented in contemporary literature, though a version of it is certainly represented in 18th- and 19th-century fiction.
Some readers react in a strongly negative way to Nate. Was it your intention to elicit such reactions?
I didn’t think of it in those terms. I consciously tried not to. Although I wanted to scrutinize his thinking and his behavior, I also wanted to be fair in my depiction. I wanted Nate to be as layered and as slippery as any actual living male and to be true enough that readers would recognize parts of themselves in him. I didn’t want to be tempted to bend the material to make him conform to an idea; that seemed like a recipe for reducing complexity. I thought if I made him feel real, readers could judge for themselves.
Nate sometimes “wondered whether he was a bit misogynistic.†Do you think he is? A bit, or more?
I think the word “misogynistic†isn’t quite right for what Nate is. I think he is an earnestly liberal, politically correct guy who genuinely believes in the stated aims of feminism, at least as far as equality goes, but I think he also harbors a good deal of reflexive sexism, some of which he is unaware of and some of which he acknowledges to himself but instinctively refrains from revealing to others. This affects his choice of romantic partner: intellectual or even moral equality is not a prerequisite for him. I also think he has a relationship to women’s appearances that I find troubling but not necessarily atypical.
Did you talk to male friends to help put Nate together, or was it more instinctual based on your experience in friendships and relationships? I’m thinking of lines like: “Although it wasn’t something he’d admit aloud, [Nate] often thought women were either deep or reasonable, but rarely both.â€
It was more instinctual, although I have to acknowledge, with gratitude, the many little nuggets of insight I got from male friends over the years. But the main part of Nate’s emotional and intellectual life, that I have to take responsibility for â€" if it doesn’t ring true, I can’t put the blame on any of my male friends.
In terms of the passage you quoted, that came out of my experience. I felt that as a woman I’ve encountered, in subtle ways, assumptions or prejudices about, say, the nature of women’s intelligence or our capacity for disinterested judgment. What I tried to do, in the novel, was to come up with a plausible account of the type of private thinking likely to underlie what I had experienced. Not that I think all men have the kind of thoughts I attribute to Nate. I do, however, suspect that many men tend to unconsciously consider their intellectual peers â€" and competitors â€" to be other men.
Lou Rouse Adelle WaldmanWho are some of your literary influences?
I have to start with George Eliot. I spent my twenties reading mostly 19th-century novels, with a bit of 18th century mixed in. Besides Eliot, Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, Stendhal, Flaubert and Tolstoy were among the writers I turned to most. One thing these authors have in common is that they pay close attention to moral life, that is, to how characters justify their behavior to themselvesâ€"their capacity or incapacity for honest self-criticism, for impartiality generally.
That said, when, in my thirties, I sat down to write this novel, I looked at the work of more contemporary writers. I didn’t want to write a 19th-century novel with an omniscient narrator and a lot of explicit moralizing. I turned to Jonathan Franzen and Richard Yates, as well as Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus.†But “The Corrections†and “Revolutionary Road†were really my go-to books, the ones I reread most frequently.
How important a role does Brooklyn play as the novel’s locale? Could the story have been placed anywhere else?
I once would have said that it wasn’t particularly important. It was just what I knew, so it is what I drew from, but what I primarily wanted to write about were relationship dynamics that are fairly universal. But one thing I learned while writing the book is just how much needs to go into a novel, into its every page, for the thing to feel at all vibrant or alive. Aside from the Brooklyn backdrop, I also found myself very interested in fleshing out the supporting characters, in Nate’s early years and in his status anxieties â€" in many things other than his relationships with women.
Are there male writers who you think write particularly well from the female perspective?
Tolstoy and Flaubert immediately come to mind. Of more contemporary writers, Norman Rush, in “Mating.†Franzen is also terrific at writing from the female perspective. But it’s probably worth noting that all these authors are excellent at writing from the perspective of male characters too. I think what they possess is less a special gift for writing women than a terrific insight into people generally.
How have your male friends reacted to the book? Do they think you “got them�
By “got them,†do you mean in a “gotcha†sense of nailing them personally? To that I’d say no, I certainly hope not. But many of my male friends have told me that Nate rings true as a guy. Of course, they are my friends, so they’d probably be wary of telling me that they thought the character fell flat.
