Dating is probably the most fraught human interaction there is. On one of their regular platonic dinner dates, Aurit's response to Nate's eyerolling plaint that "we might as well be on fucking Sex and the City" merits quoting at length: "I just hate the way so many men treat 'dating' as if it's a frivolous subject.
Which is not to trivialise: Waldman defends dating as a human, and by extension literary concern, through the character of Aurit, whom Nate thinks of as "one of the smartest women – people" he knows. The book's title has the whiff of its protagonist's private affectation: it might more honestly be called "Nate's dates". Nate is a young Brooklynite with a first novel in the publishing pipeline, a development that boosts his social and sexual status but doesn't do much for his soul. Nate Piven – the exasperating centre of Adelle Waldman's deft first novel – is that theoretical man-child made literary archetype. The culprit: the Man-Child, the kind of self-regarding guy who "doesn't want to seem like an asshole", whose sexism is "ironic". Moira Weigel and Mal Ahern's "Further Materials Toward a Theory of the Man-Child" is an excoriation of the "forms of crypto- and not-so-crypto misogyny" that have contaminated the supposedly enlightened worlds of publishing and humanities departments. T his summer, an essay published by the New Inquiry wildfired through Twitter.
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