In this three-part interview series, JBC’s Nat Bernstein spoke with Adelle Waldman, whose debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. was recently published by Henry Holt and Co. In today’s installment, they discuss Nathaniel P. and Jewishness in the post-racial meritocracy.
Nat Bernstein: Overall, the media seems particularly interested in your decision to write from the perspective of a male protagonist — which I’m sure we’ll talk about at some point; my first question, however, wasn’t “Why did you decide to make Nate a guy?” but rather, why did you decide to make Nate a Jew?
Adelle Wadlman: Other than his gender — and the fact that he went to Harvard, which I didn’t — in creating Nate I tried to use as much of my own experience as I could, because it’s hard enough to do the male stuff: the tenor of his thoughts are so different from the tenor of mine — and not just about sex or women, but even the way he thinks about his writing and his career. I had to try to channel this voice that might be similar to mine but was also very different, and because that was a challenge I tried to use as many of the biographical details from my own life as possible just to make it easier. Being Jewish is something I know, and it saved me from having to think hard about what it would have been like to grow up Catholic, the way I had to think hard about what it would be like to be a guy.
NB: So did you also attend a Jewish day school, and are your parents also immigrants?
AW: My mother’s a Romanian immigrant; my father isn’t. I attended a Jewish day school for elementary school, and then I switched to a different school. So there are ways in which I altered Nate’s biography somewhat. I simplified it: it was easier to make Nate go to one school.
NB: There’s plenty else about Nate to focus on, to be sure, but there seems to be hardly any mention of his Jewish background in reviews or interviews about the novel. And you know, on one hand, his Jewishness comes across as a minor, almost throwaway detail of this character, but at the same time, Nate is so innately Jewish; do you think that the Jewish perspective has been somewhat glossed over in the book’s general reception? If so, what would you attribute that to?
AW: One of the things I really wanted to write about wasn’t Jewishness but the particular world we live in today, where I think both religion and ethnicity — and race, too — matter so much less than they used to, socially. For my parents, most of their close friends are Jewish. They probably have a few non-Jewish friends that they’ve made over the years through work, but their friends from growing up, from college, from the neighborhoods we lived in — by and large the people in their lives have always tended to be Jewish. And this is so different from my experience, where for so much of my life my social life hasn’t been determined by religion. In the kind of world that Nate lives in — a sort of affluent, urban environment — I think there’s a lot of segregation of people that’s by class: it’s people who went to the same types of colleges, came from middle or upper-middle class backgrounds. But there’s so much more mixing in terms of religious and ethnicity and race, and I think that’s significant; it seems like a big change from the way my parents’ life was to the way mine is.
A book I really admire and read a number of times while working on my novel was Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus. The character never interacts with anyone socially who isn’t Jewish — of course, it makes sense, it’s the Sixties. There are different types of Jews, the wealthier Jews and the poorer Jews, but, other than the people he meets at work, it’s a Jewish world — and that’s great, it’s not in any way a criticism of Goodbye, Columbus: I think it’s a sign of the times. But I wanted to write about this moment, and I didn’t want to glorify it. There’s a moment in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. when Nate makes a joke about Hannah’s (latent) Catholicism being the reason she doesn’t want to sleep with him, and she shoots back something along the lines of, “No, the reason is because you’re Jewish.” And Nate’s response is to infer that anti-Semitism from someone like Hannah could only be a joke, whereas someone Catholic making that kind of joke when my parents were that age would have had a totally different connotation. That is the part of the book that I wanted to explore — this meritocratic, post-racial world we live in: I feel like Jewishness just plays out differently in that environment. And for Nate, he’s not religious, obviously, and it’s not something he’s consciously using as a factor when he’s choosing whom to date. And I think that’s kind of of-this-moment, too: there are all kinds of Jews, some more observant than others.
NB: Is Nate perhaps using it as a factor in choosing whom not to date?
AW: I imagine him being a little more indifferent. I don’t talk about this in the book, but I give Greer, the woman with whom he ends up, the last name Cohen, so presumably she’s Jewish. (In my mind, she is Jewish, but I hesitate to throw in information that’s not in the book.) I don’t think he was — as perhaps his mother might have suspected at moments, when he had a girlfriend named Kristen in college — consciously avoiding Jewish women: I think it really was a nonfactor for him. And I say that, perhaps, because I’m drawing on my own experience, where I feel like I’ve had boyfriends who were Jewish and boyfriends who were not Jewish, and it seemed to my parents that I went out of my way to date non-Jews, but that wasn’t the case.
NB: Do you think Jewish audiences read The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. differently than others? Maybe in the same way that writers (or aspiring writers), or single Brooklynites in their thirties, or the children of immigrants might pick up on certain nuances that the rest of us fail to perceive?
AW: I get such a variety of responses, but I don’t know if I have a large enough sample size. At a reading I did in Baltimore, where I grew up, one of my mom’s friends asked if I had gone to Jewish sleepover camp over the summers — apropos of nothing: it was the first question after I was done reading. I was trying to figure out if her implication was that if I had gone to Jewish sleepover camp maybe my portrayal of suburban Baltimore would have been more flattering. I guess I worried about that. In my mind, I felt that the book, when it does go back in time, is sort of “equal-opportunity”: it’s satirizing the Jewish world and also the WASP‑y stuff at Harvard, so I hope that no one was offended by that.
To me, there’s something characteristically Jewish in the aspect of Nate that is so concerned with being a nice guy and doing the right thing. And it’s so ironic, because he often doesn’t do the right thing, if the right thing is defined as the kindest thing. But I think that Nate’s concern about his behavior, while not exclusively Jewish, is not uncharacteristic of a Jewish man. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing; I don’t think it’s somehow enough with Nate to make him not be hurtful to the women with whom he gets involved, either. I really did want to write about a man who has a conscience, who’s not a sociopath, and who has some kind of moral sense, and still he has trouble. I do think that’s characteristically, if not exclusively, a trait of Jewish men.
Nat Bernstein’s interview with Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., is being published serially online as part of the Jewish Book Council’s ProsenPeople blog. Check back tomorrow for the second installment, in which they discuss writing about relationships, composing witty epigrams, and the complexities of correspondence with readers.Nat Bernstein is the former Manager of Digital Content & Media, JBC Network Coordinator, and Contributing Editor at the Jewish Book Council and a graduate of Hampshire College.