Adelle Waldman has cleverly chosen to tell the story of a younger generation’s romantic chaos not from the perspective of a woman panicked that she’s wasting her prime but from that of a young man trying to enjoy his. Her Nathaniel Piven, a thirty-something-year-old Brooklyn novelist and burgeoning public intellectual, is thoughtful yet careless, open-minded yet absurdly entitled. In trying to understand the source of his self-satisfaction, which is ultimately the source of his power, Waldman has written a book of stately revenge, exposing all that is shallow and oblivious about Nate, and men like him.