Jones calls herself fairly heavy-handed, but in this case her input was minimal.

“You need word of mouth and you need people to feel like they want to talk about it.”Īs an editor, Ms. “If aren’t enthusiastic, it should probably be published elsewhere, because it’s a team effort,” she said. Jones knew her colleagues’ reaction bode well. One of Holt’s associate editors said she couldn’t wait to talk about Nathaniel P. “Unfortunately, this rings true,” the colleague said when asked for his opinion on whether the novel captured the male mindset. Rubin called a colleague, who was late to the meeting, for some male reinforcement. Jones recalled, when they found out the result of Nate’s courtship of Hannah, the nice-girl object of his ambivalent affection for most of the book. Jones, who had already finished the book, told her co-workers, who hadn’t, the ending. The next day, during a meeting in publisher Steve Rubin’s office, enthusiasm was unusually high. Jones gave it to colleagues for their take. At the centre of the story is the relationship between Nate and Hannah, an intelligent, attractive, aspiring writer Nate meets at a dinner party (given by an old flame, of course), and its progress from a promising beginning to its poisonous and inexplicable terminus.As soon as the book came in, Ms.

In fact, the 'cocktail of pity and guilt and dread' from which he chronically suffers confirms, for him, his moral rectitude and egalitarian life philosophy.Īdelle Waldman is less convinced of his blamelessness but nevertheless sympathetic to the plight of both men and women, even preening and self-absorbed ones who partake in the skewed sexual economy without acknowledging their complicity in its making. He never deliberately scorns the women he beds, impregnates or dates, sometimes, for years at a time. And if he happens to be flummoxed by one aggrieved ex after another in the neighbourhood, well, isn't that simply further testament to his conscience shaped by a 'post-feminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education'? The question is much on Nate's mind, though, as a thirtysomething writer on such ponderous topics as the 'commodification of conscience', he tends to come at it rhetorically. As a resident of Brooklyn, the hipster hub increasingly gentrified by 'faux-dives, hip restaurants' and beautiful editorial assistants to Very Important Magazines,Nate is surrounded by like-minded literati. N athaniel (Nate) Piven – a Harvard graduate and budding cultural critic basking in the glory of a book contract he's just landed – is not someone who, in the parlance of less liberal-minded and more licentious men, likes to 'hit it and quit it' when it comes to women.

The love affairs of nathaniel p review