The Love Affairs of Prestige

Reflections on 'Nathaniel P' and the new media age

We’re nearly at the twenty-fourth anniversary of 9/11, which is difficult to believe. In Glass Century, my new novel, I wrestled directly with the implications of that day. Compact Magazine declared, to my great gratification, “few have captured their horror and the lasting impact they’ve [the Twin Towers] had on an entire generation better than Ross Barkan in his new novel, Glass Century.” If you liked the book and agree, please rate it on Goodreads.

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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. It helps that, unlike many other “writer” novels of the last decade and a half, The Love Affairs of National P. is in no way autofictional, despite the resemblances characters have to actual novelists, critics, and bloggers in 2000s and 2010s New York. The quasi-omniscient third person, through free indirect discourse, tracks rising novelist and critic Nate as he sleeps his way through New York and enters a dissatisfying relationship with “nice” girl Hannah, all the while rendering judgement on the mores of the era. Nate, the Harvard-educated son of immigrant parents, appears to be loosely based on Keith Gessen, the N+1 co-founder. The woman he moves in with, at novel’s end, is an “it” girl memoirist who may or may not be inspired by Gessen’s wife, Emily Gould, who is now an editor at New York Magazine and was known, in the 2000s, as an enfant terrible of the Gawker vanguard. A friend of Nate’s, according to the New York Times, is modeled on the literary critic Christian Lorentzen, though I would not have realized that without reading the media coverage.

What I became interested in, as I journeyed again through the novel, was its sociology: what it said about the literary and media worlds of late 2000s New York, and what’s shifted dramatically since. I felt, as I read it anew, I had racked up enough “qualifications” to make this kind of study. I am, at thirty-five, slightly older than Nate. If my career arc is not exactly akin to his—I never scraped out a living as a book critic, and my debut novel was hardly noticed at all—I understood, very well, the kind of life he was leading. Born around 1977, the same age as Waldman, Nate stands at the precipice of what I’ve come to think of as the Silver Age of New York literary life. I was a teenager during this period, and mostly unaware of it, but I caught the exhaust fumes in the 2010s, when I was an intern at The L Magazine (defunct) and a staff reporter at the Jared Kushner-owned New York Observer (mostly defunct.) If the Golden Age was that long midcentury stretching into the inordinately lush 1980s and 1990s—think Graydon Carter’s bacchanalian Vanity Fair, Jay McInerney wielding a sword on the cover of Esquire, an uptown weekly newspaper, that aforementioned Observer, effectively launching Sex and the City—the 2000s were, at the dawn of internet media, a time when a certain kind of literary prestige still very much mattered.

Though the internet was, by the end of the decade, well on its way to hallowing out the old media, it was still benign enough—or a hindrance in the way a minor roach infestation might be—to not cause so much sturm und drang. Gawker was louche, the bloggers were pesky, but they all could, for a period, coexist with the old lions. The internet would supplement, not destroy, and the digital natives would simply punch up. Bloggers don’t rate much of a mention in The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. because, in Nate’s world of high literature and little magazines, they aren’t worth considering for too long. Social media isn’t relevant, either. Instead, he and his buddies fret book advances and where they might place their next essay. Waldman rarely names publications, but it’s not hard to determine the New Republic or N+1 stand-in. Some of the humor of the novel derives from Nate’s annoyance when a writer he doesn’t think highly of nabs a review assignment that he believes should have been his. It is a less bilious, brawling version of Norman Podhoretz’s Making It, these on-the-make writers drinking less, throwing fewer punches—no Mailer among them—and sublimating some of their pettiness, if they always long for their rivals to fall. The social stock market, certainly, persists.

If the media and literary worlds of the 2020s still feature these sorts of competitions for status, we are long past the Golden and Silver Ages. The digital froth of the 2010s—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, the ceaseless click-baiting and SEO-hunting—could be understood as a Bronze Age, and we are now after the fall, in a new era we can’t quite name yet. Literary prestige, for one, has never meant less. Once, a mere nomination for a major literary award could launch a novelist into a kind of permanent orbit of minor fame and acclaim; a single review or even well-read essay in a major magazine could be the building block of a career. A rave in the New York Times was enough, or a short story in the Paris Review. The magazines that Nate and his cohort tussled over all very much mattered in the sense that a certain review or piece of criticism could ripple outward and be bantered about readily in educated circles. This can still happen in certain forms, like the takedown of Lauren Oyler in Bookforum, but it’s not as common as it once was. New York is the rare magazine to consistently penetrate the zeitgeist (Nepo Baby, West Village Girls), performing in a manner that was once common for the likes of Vanity Fair, Esquire, and Vogue but isn’t any longer. The digital age has been ruthless to magazines, eviscerating their print bottom lines, and most, beyond New York and the Atlantic and the New Yorker, haven’t found the creative, nimble leadership to simultaneously make them digital heavyweights while safeguarding the print legacy. Simply put, magazines and newspapers matter less than they did in the 2000s, and the Nate-like struggles for media dominance in a Brooklyn fishbowl are, for the most part, passé. There is a great profusion of smaller literary and intellectual magazines today, some of them quite good, but they do not yet boast the star-making power of the 2000s era N+1, which helped land hefty six-figure deals for Chad Harbach and Benjamin Kunkel’s debuts, elevated Elif Batuman to greater literary heights, and netted Gessen, at his peak, a Gossip Girl cameo. The closest analog to the old N+1, in the 2020s, is The Drift, another Ivy League literary magazine that shot to prominence in 2022 when it was profiled in the Times. (A Times profile, rather than a review, is still significant.) Drift writers have published novels and work at prominent outlets, but none, yet, have enjoyed as much acclaim as the original N+1 crowd.

I’ve been mulling, of late, what a 2020s version of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. would look like. I have no plans to write it—too many other projects, and I’m not sure I’d be the right fit, anyway—but someone, out there, should. It would be, in one sense, more difficult because literary prestige today has both declined and transmogrified, with new scenes splintering, the online taking on fresh intensity, and the physical points of contact—the readings, the parties—becoming larger, even more decadent, than at least what came before in the 2010s. Several years ago, in the New Statesman, Nick Burns wrote about a physical and spiritual divide between left-leaning literary Brooklyn and Manhattan, with the latter represented by Dimes Square and the former embodied, in some form, by The Drift. Dimes Square refers to a literal place—an area between Chinatown and the Lower East Side—and an arts scene that was characterized, fairly enough, as a home for reactionary, Trump-friendly quasi-bohemians and tech operatives. The Red Scare podcasters, The Dare, the novelist Honor Levy, the actor and writer Peter Vack, the playwright Matthew Gasda (profiled, as well, in the Times for writing a popular play called “Dimes Square”), Mars Review of Books founder Noah Kumin, and the writer Matthew Davis were some of the luminaries, with their chroniclers including Nick Dove, the nightlife photographer and writer, and Mike Crumplar, a leftist known for his stream of consciousness Substack. Like any scene, it had its haunts: the bar Clandestino, the since-shuttered Sovereign House, Metrograph, Montez Press Radio, and Lucien, the popular French restaurant. The art products were of debatable quality, and the scene seems to have exhausted itself.

What it did do, however—and why, in a strange way, I’m not as dismissive of Dimes Square as most in my orbit—is infuse the literary gathering with a fresh sense of urgency and cool. The Drift was part of this, too: as the pandemic receded, literary readings and magazine launch parties became like 2000s rock shows. Young people, hundreds at a time, packed Brooklyn and Manhattan bars and hotels, leading to my observation, come 2022, a magazine launch could boast much more enthusiasm than a political rally. And it wasn’t just The Drift: magazines like Heavy Traffic and Forever drew enormous crowds, to the point where the readings and the writings felt like afterthoughts. Were they entirely afterthoughts? Not necessarily. You were liable to find plenty of readers and writers in the mix. It was more that they were tired of cloistering themselves at home or gathering at one of the staid, 2010s-style readings that were, on the balance, more cliquish and too yoked to a particular kind of social justice politics. The new parties felt, simultaneously, more cosmopolitan and rowdier, and harkened back to an earlier New York. They continue to this day.

The second factor is Substack. Inarguably, the platform is the emerging locus of the literary world, and may swallow it completely in the next five years. The Nate P. of today would have a Substack and be nervously checking his subscriber count. But what’s different about the 2020s is that status, on its own, is far less concrete, and there’s no set of publications or even subscriber count that can, suddenly, win you great acclaim. If that can be frustrating, it’s also, more often than not, a form of liberation. Yes, it’s wonderful to have your short story in the New Yorker or Paris Review, but neither achievement carries the same weight of even a decade ago. Other prestige publications aren’t nudging needles like they once did, either. A month ago, my new nonfiction book, Fascism or Genocide, was reviewed in the New Republic. In Nate’s era, this would have been considered a coup, even if the review was decidedly mixed. You were someone to appear in the pages of the New Republic. But I had no idea, for at least three weeks, that my book had been reviewed there. None. No one had told me. Since I wasn’t seeking it out, it was like it did not exist. Whereas if a Substacker of some renown writes on me—Brandon Taylor, for example, delivering a somewhat anguished critique of Glass Century—I know immediately. I am receiving emails, notifications, and writers are commenting to me in person. This is true, too, of Substacks that are not as well-followed as Taylor’s but have a core readership that relishes everything a particular writer publishes. A writer on Substack with even 1,000 subscribers is, to a degree, quite influential because each of those email signups are there for a purpose. There are no bots, or Twitter-like followers who selectively tune out a reasonable portion of their feed. A serious question to ask, in the 2020s, is if you’d rather have Naomi Kanakia write on you favorably or the New Republic. I’d choose Kanakia, and not because I am quite fond of her newsletter. It’s that every essay she publishes is guaranteed to reach an audience of thousands of human beings who are hungry for what she has to say. If Kanakia or Henry Begler or John Pistelli or Chris Jesu Lee or Alexander Sorondo wants to opine on my book, the impact is immediately felt; there is no such thing, once you’ve got a Substack following, of publishing into a void. That’s not true for many publications in America today. Even those with a century of history are failing to punch through. And given the success of writers on Substack, this clearly has nothing to do with a lack of capable readers or a withering of the culture. I’ve learned this through founding The Metropolitan Review which, in an under a year, is one of the more widely read literary magazines in the country. The engine of Substack—and the sheer amount of literary talent coursing across America and the world—makes it all possible.

A happy fusion is taking place in New York, where literary readings and parties now draw energy from the online ferment of Substack. The writers have Substack newsletters, or readers gather having found the writers from there. At my own launch, for Glass Century, more than a hundred people turned up, and this would not have happened even two years ago. A newsletter brought those people out to a Manhattan bookstore. Beyond Substack, Instagram remains a popular way to advertise literary events. A Dimes Square-adjacent Instagram group chat called Sweetychat has spawned a new reading series—Sweeychat, with its more liberal bent, might be thought of as post-Dimes—and Nick Dove, the photographer and writer, has his own Manhattan series, where I read at last month. Mo Diggs, the great Substack culture writer, will be a Sweetychat reader this month. How would this all stack up against Nate’s 2000s? How would it be rendered in a novel? It’s difficult to say. If Trumpian Dimes offered a darker undercurrent, there is also, generally, more bonhomie among writers themselves. With the old-world rat race for prestige having faded for good—it’s just not worth sweating an NBCC nomination or a well-placed New Republic review anymore—bitter, personalized rivalries for literary supremacy can feel dated. Who am I in competition with, as a New York writer? In the end, the answer is myself; I want to be the greatest I can be, to produce work that will last, and I’ll battle onward toward that goal. If others succeed, all the better.