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A Debut Novel Mixes Lust With the Directionless of Youth A Debut Novel Mixes Lust With the Directionlessness of Youth
(35 minutes later)
EARLY WORK By Andrew Martin 240 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.EARLY WORK By Andrew Martin 240 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $26.
What would life be like if you were pleasantly indifferent to it? Peter, the center of Andrew Martin’s marvelous debut novel, “Early Work,” is one living answer to this question. Peter is in his late 20s, able-bodied and educated. He appears to come from family money, so there’s no student debt and no urgent grasping for food or shelter. Love, affection and luck land in his lap. He’s generally apolitical and doesn’t subscribe to any particular belief system that might limit his indulgences. In other words, Peter is what happens when life is totally stripped of constraints: either a paragon of Zen be-here-nowness or a worthless layabout, depending on your method of evaluating people and what page of the book you’re on.What would life be like if you were pleasantly indifferent to it? Peter, the center of Andrew Martin’s marvelous debut novel, “Early Work,” is one living answer to this question. Peter is in his late 20s, able-bodied and educated. He appears to come from family money, so there’s no student debt and no urgent grasping for food or shelter. Love, affection and luck land in his lap. He’s generally apolitical and doesn’t subscribe to any particular belief system that might limit his indulgences. In other words, Peter is what happens when life is totally stripped of constraints: either a paragon of Zen be-here-nowness or a worthless layabout, depending on your method of evaluating people and what page of the book you’re on.
When we start, he’s living in Virginia with his girlfriend of five years, a medical student named Julia. Peter teaches part time at a women’s correctional center, but mostly he loafs, gets stoned, gets drunk, illegally streams baseball and writes fiction with minimal conviction. He describes himself, accurately, as “artistic and useless.” Then he gets a crush on a woman named Leslie.When we start, he’s living in Virginia with his girlfriend of five years, a medical student named Julia. Peter teaches part time at a women’s correctional center, but mostly he loafs, gets stoned, gets drunk, illegally streams baseball and writes fiction with minimal conviction. He describes himself, accurately, as “artistic and useless.” Then he gets a crush on a woman named Leslie.
Like Peter, Leslie is nominally a writer, but in practice she’s a champion consumer of alcohol and a locus of randy impulses. She’s ruinously articulate and has all of the book’s funniest lines. (When Peter loses custody of his beloved female dog: “Eh, bitch never liked me anyway.”) The two escalate from defensible activities, like maneuvering close to each other at a dinner party, to iffy solo drinks to carnal relations in just a week or two. “We’re adults,” Peter tells Leslie after their first kiss, before identifying the phrase as a “universal verbal marker of childish behavior.”Like Peter, Leslie is nominally a writer, but in practice she’s a champion consumer of alcohol and a locus of randy impulses. She’s ruinously articulate and has all of the book’s funniest lines. (When Peter loses custody of his beloved female dog: “Eh, bitch never liked me anyway.”) The two escalate from defensible activities, like maneuvering close to each other at a dinner party, to iffy solo drinks to carnal relations in just a week or two. “We’re adults,” Peter tells Leslie after their first kiss, before identifying the phrase as a “universal verbal marker of childish behavior.”
Individually, Peter and Leslie have the amount of self-determination typically found in a jellyfish or a dandelion tuft. But smashed together these two inert life-forms create a tumult of sexual and emotional energy. Who knew they had it in them? But that’s love, of course: the chemical mystery of two ingredients coming together to form a third thing — a relationship. Meanwhile, Peter fails to break up with his girlfriend, who catches on to him and cuts him loose. To judge by its plot summary, “Early Work” is about the age-old drama of ethics getting steamrollered by desire. But it’s more than a tale of adultery.Individually, Peter and Leslie have the amount of self-determination typically found in a jellyfish or a dandelion tuft. But smashed together these two inert life-forms create a tumult of sexual and emotional energy. Who knew they had it in them? But that’s love, of course: the chemical mystery of two ingredients coming together to form a third thing — a relationship. Meanwhile, Peter fails to break up with his girlfriend, who catches on to him and cuts him loose. To judge by its plot summary, “Early Work” is about the age-old drama of ethics getting steamrollered by desire. But it’s more than a tale of adultery.
For one thing, it’s a book crammed with books. Peter lives in a house full of them, and he thinks about an Argentine novella during sex with Julia, who writes poetry when she’s not at the hospital. His friends start book groups and collapse drunkenly into bed, not to fornicate or fall asleep, but to read Cormac McCarthy. Renata Adler, William James, Anthony Powell, Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Stephen King and Margaret Atwood make cameos. It’s like one of those restaurant dishes that take a vegetable and do it in multiple preparations on the same plate — “beets, three ways” — in an effort to surround and capture that vegetable’s essence. “Early Work” is books, three ways.For one thing, it’s a book crammed with books. Peter lives in a house full of them, and he thinks about an Argentine novella during sex with Julia, who writes poetry when she’s not at the hospital. His friends start book groups and collapse drunkenly into bed, not to fornicate or fall asleep, but to read Cormac McCarthy. Renata Adler, William James, Anthony Powell, Philip Roth, Thomas Mann, J. M. Coetzee, Don DeLillo, Stephen King and Margaret Atwood make cameos. It’s like one of those restaurant dishes that take a vegetable and do it in multiple preparations on the same plate — “beets, three ways” — in an effort to surround and capture that vegetable’s essence. “Early Work” is books, three ways.
Like a long line of fictional characters before him, Peter dignifies his misdeeds by casting them as potential literary scenarios. A petty deception can be construed as a personal plot twist; a catastrophic drunken evening might make for good material one day. He’s Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, if she’d vaped a lot and dropped out of a Ph.D. program. “I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention — like a Hardy novel where I’d exceeded my society’s allowance for freethinking and was now being punished,” Peter fancies, lolling on vacation in Maine in his picturesque agony. “But I wasn’t actually that stupid.”Like a long line of fictional characters before him, Peter dignifies his misdeeds by casting them as potential literary scenarios. A petty deception can be construed as a personal plot twist; a catastrophic drunken evening might make for good material one day. He’s Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, if she’d vaped a lot and dropped out of a Ph.D. program. “I wanted my unhappiness to be a result of defying convention — like a Hardy novel where I’d exceeded my society’s allowance for freethinking and was now being punished,” Peter fancies, lolling on vacation in Maine in his picturesque agony. “But I wasn’t actually that stupid.”
If I’m doing a poor job of demonstrating that Peter is, in fact, an intensely compelling protagonist, that’s because I have no clue how Martin pulls it off. Ditto for Leslie, whose perspective interrupts the book in three slender sections. The detours make sense in a book about meandering people making detours of their own, bringing to mind Laurie Colwin or Mona Simpson — other spinners of precise fictional webs about sloppy people. And like Catherine Morland’s creator, Martin too balances Peter’s (considerable) annoying qualities with sensitivity, yearning and comic blunders. He doesn’t condemn his character, but he doesn’t justify the guy, either.If I’m doing a poor job of demonstrating that Peter is, in fact, an intensely compelling protagonist, that’s because I have no clue how Martin pulls it off. Ditto for Leslie, whose perspective interrupts the book in three slender sections. The detours make sense in a book about meandering people making detours of their own, bringing to mind Laurie Colwin or Mona Simpson — other spinners of precise fictional webs about sloppy people. And like Catherine Morland’s creator, Martin too balances Peter’s (considerable) annoying qualities with sensitivity, yearning and comic blunders. He doesn’t condemn his character, but he doesn’t justify the guy, either.
“Early Work” is a tidy and perfectly ornamented novel with no unsanded corners or unglossed surfaces. It rewards as much attention as you want to give it. Read it on a beach for the refreshment of a classic boy-meets-girl plot, or turn the pages more slowly to soak in some truly salty koans and morally insolvent characters. If I were a millionaire I’d start a foundation to subsidize novels like it, because I worry about them. It’s not a book that will inspire hot takes or incendiary tweets; the author is unfashionably male and the concerns unfashionably universal. It’s an accomplished and delightful book, but there’s no hashtag for that.“Early Work” is a tidy and perfectly ornamented novel with no unsanded corners or unglossed surfaces. It rewards as much attention as you want to give it. Read it on a beach for the refreshment of a classic boy-meets-girl plot, or turn the pages more slowly to soak in some truly salty koans and morally insolvent characters. If I were a millionaire I’d start a foundation to subsidize novels like it, because I worry about them. It’s not a book that will inspire hot takes or incendiary tweets; the author is unfashionably male and the concerns unfashionably universal. It’s an accomplished and delightful book, but there’s no hashtag for that.