The Love Affairs of Prestige

Not long ago, I reread large chunks of The Love Affairs of Nataniel P., which is one of the great American novels of the 2010s. Adelle Waldman’s debut is a send-up of literary Brooklyn, but it is, at heart, a nineteenth century novel brought into the twenty-first, a tale of tangled romance and status competition. Waldman’s pacing, pitch, and attention to detail are exquisite, and it’s thrilling to rediscover a novel that is weightier than you remembered, more alive than when you found it in your early twenties. As a writer in New York, I began to ponder what a novel like this would look like in the 2020s, and why more of them did not exist. Yes, there are plenty of contemporary novels about metropolitan writers, but none are so exacting, so rich in the minutiae that makes a scene real and the literature of it so vital.