In the tradition of writers from Austen

"He's got a good pair of lungs on him, that's for sure," said Prince William, holding his son swaddled in a cream blanket. "He's got her looks, thankfully," he added, nodding toward his wife. The duchess added that Prince William had already changed his first "nappy."

The first public sighting of the baby will go a long way toward satisfying the mass of world media that has been camped outside the hospital for days awaiting a glimpse of the new prince and his mother. But the royal couple is keeping them and the public guessing on another important front: the new prince's name.

"We're still working on a name, so we'll have that as soon as we can," Prince William said. The royal couple then went back inside the hospital briefly, before leaving by car to take their boy home to Kensington Palace.

Their departure followed visits Tuesday afternoon by both sets of grandparents: Prince William's father, Prince Charles, and his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, as well as the parents of the former Kate Middleton. As she left the hospital, the Duchess of Cambridge's mother, Carole Middleton, said both new mother and baby were "doing really well."

Outside Buckingham Palace, crowds continued to gather Tuesday to view the easel officially announcing the baby's birth,Home electricity monitor which has been on public display since Monday.

Sam O'Neill, a secondary school history teacher from Bromley, Kent, waited about a half-hour with her mother, Jenny Edwards, a former nurse at a London hospital. Having just taken a tour of the House of Commons, Mrs. O'Neill said: "We couldn't not come and see this historic moment having just seen the past history of our kings and queens." The women were delighted at the short wait; after Princess Diana died, they waited in a line eight hours overnight to commemorate her.

For her debut novel The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P., Adelle Waldman plunges readers into the mind of Nate, a 30-something writer living in Brooklyn who’s secured a sizable book advance and the interest of the city’s lit-savvy female population. While she doesn’t exactly re-
invent the wheel depicting overeducated writers overanalyzing sex, Ms. Waldman’s book is far less cartoonish than recent efforts like Girls.

Like that show’s protagonist, Nate isn’t particularly sympathetic. He’s not a “bad” guy, he just doesn’t treat women very well. Nate becomes a vehicle for Ms. Waldman’s suspicions about men—that they regard women with certain prejudices even when they subscribe to liberal, feminist doctrines on equality. In the tradition of writers from Austen to Tolstoy, Ms. Waldman delights in showing us the way we rationalize our treatment of others and she writes vividly, capturing the dynamics of a dinner party or describing the lights on the East River bridges. As Nate takes a girl home for the first time, he sees them “dangling like necklaces beneath the brightly lit towers, a fireworks display frozen at its most expansive moment.”

To Ms. Waldman’s credit, she captures romantic dysfunction and the erosion of love so faithfully—passive-aggressive conversations about bagels, alienating sex so one-sided “it might as well be masturbation,” alternating waves of disgust and tenderness—that while Nate may be both attracted to and repelled by women, the reader is rarely drawn to him.
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