There are two key messages that run clearly through Adelle Waldman’s debut novel, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. The first is that were I to show up in Brooklyn, it would probably take less than 24 hours for my arrest on grounds of mass homicide. Because, let me tell you, there are few categories of human being more intensely aggravating than the Brooklyn hipster intelligentsia.

The second? Well, that’s slightly more confusing, but the long and the short of it is: men are real pigs. Through and through. Utterly swinish, shallow, febrile, puerile creatures, these men, the sort of individuals that you read about and then find yourself clicking through gender re-assignment surgery options because as a man, you’re so horribly embarrassed to share the common fact of testosterone with them. And when, like Waldman’s eponymous protagonist, Nathaniel P., they possess an educated awareness resulting from “a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education,” they seem to be even worse.

The story of Nate P. and his love affairs begins a few months before the imminent publication of Nate’s first novel. Possession of a six-figure book deal would, you’d think, reduce the amount of sturm und drang in one’s existence, but for Nate, money as a concern is a distant second to the utter trauma caused by the women in his life. Despite what Waldman describes as a “functional and frankly rather clamorous conscience,” Nate is very hard done by, specifically because of those ‘pesky women’ who just never turn out to be right for him in some way, shape, or form.

Waldman pulls a bit of a Jane Austen here, ditching the quasi-philosophical meanderings of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen in favour of focusing on Nate exclusively. She lays out his dating history with four young women: Kristen, Elisa, Hannah, and Greer — and fortunately for us, each relationship forged here goes so utterly, tragically wrong, that Waldman is practically obligated to explain how everything went pear-shaped through a series of back-stories.

Remember when we spoke of how Nate was never in the wrong? Here’s why: Kristen was “reasonable but not deep,” Elisa was attractive but patronising, Hannah, who Nate meets at a dinner hosted by Elisa, is both attractive and intelligent, but has slightly flabby upper arms and owns some very unflattering pairs of jeans. I leave you to assess Greer on your own, because before you start perceiving Nate as a completely sophomoric cretin, it’s important to realise that he’s actually quite a bright young thing: a Harvard alum with a successful literary career as a critic and writer.

Regrettably, Nate also lacks self-awareness, which is probably why he has friends like the execrable Jason, whose utter lack of success in the New York dating circuit is probably due to his considered opinion that “if smart people only mated with smart people, class structures would ossify. There’d be a permanent underclass of stupid people.”

Waldman structures her novel mostly around conversations between her characters as they meet, debate, and abandon each other in gentrifying neighbourhoods Brooklyn. Given that Waldman is herself a resident of Brooklyn, it’s no surprise that some of her best lines are about the behaviour of its residents and the places in which they interact, such as the sports bar “Outpost,” which she — via Nate — describes as “a newish establishment that appeared to be patronised almost exclusively by the white people who’d begun to move into the historically black neighbourhood in which it was located.”

This is part of what makes The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. so much fun to read. In taking the mickey out of her own neighbours (and geography), Waldman rents out Nate’s head to us so effectively that we can’t help but start seeing situations through his lenses, and cringing when, in his weekly parental check-ins, he is asked by his father: “Have you given any thought to self-publishing?” Waldman uses her novel to put Brooklyn and its resident hipsters under a microscope shaped by irony and sarcasm: characters rejoice in paroxysms of joy when they discover organically sourced food items, quiver with anticipation at the thought of arugula pizzas, and twitch in uncontrollable fits of jealousy when their peers demonstrate any sort of success.

This is where The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. departs from the standard trope of mockery. Waldman may focus on the social tics of Nate, but really, her target is neither the women who are just out there looking for a nice guy, nor the oblivious “new generation” of men who think that paying for an abortion is a chivalrous act, and really, what more could one do? Instead of making “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” generalisations, Waldman chooses to thoroughly tar and feather the whole social stratum of economically privileged, highly-educated, self-defined “liberals” who consider it a mark of no mean significance to engage in self-congratulatory conversations comprised mostly of pretentious pseudo-academia.

Waldman writes not about what happens when people meet, but instead, about what happens when dogmas collide. The world she sketches and skewers is one in which people evaluate each other on the contents of their bookcases, or their tastes in literature: her characters are defined by their reading habits or abstract philosophical stances; they are the kind of people who react to Proust “as if the sheer extravagance of [his] prose was morally objectionable, as if there were children in Africa who could have better used those excess words.”

In other words, they’re the kind of people who, despite their best efforts to pretend otherwise, are shallow, puerile, self-deluded and insecure. We read about them not because Waldman is so funny — because she is — or because it’s so easy to mock them (honestly, it’s hard not to), but because when all is said and done, at least we aren’t them. That’s a state of being, many love affairs or not, that has much to recommend it.

The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P(Novel)By Adelle WaldmanHenry Holt and Co, USISBN 0805097457256pp.