Nate self-consciously analyzes his treatment of women, and the self-consciousness is itself maddening, yet alluring. Waldman goes deeply into the swirlingly complex contradictions of the sensitive literary man’s relationship with the women that surround him. In a delicately disdainful assessment of Keith Gessen’s celebrated novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, Andrew O’Hagan wrote, “There must, after all, be a way of life in which literary men are not enslaved to the sad business of always having to do better than ‘the people they went to college with.’ ” It is admittedly a very narrow and weirdly provincial universe Waldman is so fiercely and effectively exposing a universe of aspiring writers, novelists, and contributors to highbrow magazines who live in certain neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and went to certain schools.
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