In the middle of last decade, amidst the publication of several novels by and about (to borrow the title of just one) sad young literary men, The Awl’s Choire Sicha wrote a brilliant essay in the New York Observer hazarding a guess at just what was making all the young literary men so sad. “These writers, our boys not overseas, are friendly,” Sicha wrote. “And ambitious and ashamed of ambition.” Sicha was identifying in novelists a broader trend. Men everywhere are (for this process is still happening) responding to feminism by redefining masculinity so that it no longer clashes with their own feminist values. They have earnestly imbibed feminism, but it has dawned on them that if, as the feminists insist, the personal is political, then that goes for them, too. Men, no less than women, cannot only advocate pro-woman policies in the ballot box or on their Twitter feeds, but also in their professional, day-to-day, and intimate interactions.

And that, in Sicha’s analysis, presents a problem: Men, even postfeminist, remain men, and therefore cannot help but possess many of the practically anti-woman traits that feminism sought to curb in the first place. “Ambition,” of the masculine variety, is one such trait Sicha homes in on, in the case of the novelists. “Men, finding that they cannot really get status or security from the ownership of women very often, find their very selves disparaged,” Sicha observed. The ambition remains even as the means for fulfilling it has become unacceptable, even taboo. The novelists’ solution to this quandary, Sicha realized, is to subject us to their mopey novels of narcissism, which is its own kind of masculine chest-thumping. They redefined masculinity in response to feminism in a way that did not strip being a man of all its privileges. Boys will be ashamed of being boys. But they will be boys.

Nate Piven, the 30-ish, Brooklyn-based sad young literary man of Adelle Waldman’s new, debut novel, the fiendishly readable The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., is much like the heroes of the novels Sicha was talking about, although, of course, his author is a woman. Very few of the novel’s details feel false, and some are eerily on-the-money, such as Nate’s sudden panic as he realizes his ex-girlfriend Elisa is coming on to him at an impeccably drawn Greenpoint dinner party she is hosting—“he felt, he imagined, like a soldier who had been having a rollicking time on guard duty until he heard the crackle of approaching gunfire.” (I wonder who was Waldman’s source among the male half of Brooklyn’s writer set, and what bureaucratic frustration precipitated the leak.) Most importantly, Waldman gets the big detail right: When it comes to women, Nate’s “clamorous conscience” comes into conflict with the exercise of his natural advantages as a single, successful, attractive heterosexual man in a sexual economy that, for him, is very much a buyer’s market.

The meat of the plot is Nate’s relationship with a cute writer from Cleveland named Hannah. They fall for each other; enjoy each other; and then, as he wises to her imperfections, he draws away from her with casual carelessness. “Nathaniel Piven,” Waldman tells us on the third page (she is also a journalist, and knows how to write a nut graf), “was a product of a postfeminist, 1980s childhood and politically correct, 1990s college education. He had learned all about male privilege.” Or, as Waldman puts it elsewhere, “Sometimes, he wondered whether he was a bit misogynistic.” He is misogynistic and ashamed of his misogyny.

Waldman tips her hand to her intentions with an epigraph from George Eliot and an opening episode involving a pregnancy—Nate runs into a (different) ex who'd had an abortion while they were together, and to whom Nate had been an asshole. The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. wants to emulate the great 19th-century novels. The reason so many of those books also had unwanted pregnancies—think of Hester Prynne, Tess Durbeyfield, and Eliot’s own Hetty Sorrel, she of the “coquettish tyranny”—is because it was a convenient device for illuminating the thing that tends to stress out most people—fictional or otherwise—which is the collision of transcendent truisms (like the fact that when young people have sex, the woman frequently gets pregnant) and social conventions (like the fact that, 150 years ago and also today, this could be seen as an irreversible stain on the woman’s character).