COOL FOR AMERICA
Stories
By Andrew Martin
It’s a charming gambit, and a clever one, to call your first novel “Early Work.” It’s sly and knowing: It invites, and pre-empts, the inevitable reassessment by posterity, while inserting yourself insistently, durably, into posterity. It’s a brag of future greatness — one-hit wonders don’t have early work — that is helpfully insulated from the present. After all, as Leslie, the charismatic wild woman of Andrew Martin’s 2018 debut, tells Peter, her struggling writer paramour: “It’s your early work, man. It’s allowed to be terrible.”
But “Early Work” wasn’t terrible. It managed to be simultaneously sharp and self-lacerating and generous and agreeable, a postcollegiate picaresque whose selfish hero was winningly cleareyed and disarmingly candid about his own shortcomings. It was received as an anachronism but met with a raft of glowing reviews all the same. The author might be “unfashionably male,” in the words of a reviewer in these pages, but the concerns were “unfashionably universal”: the romantic travails of the young, straight and white. (Maybe not entirely universal.)
Now on the heels of “Early Work” comes earlier work. The stories that make up “Cool for America” have been appearing in journals like The Paris Review since well before the publication of the novel. Several take place in Missoula, Mont., where Martin completed an M.F.A. This is not to say that these stories are a kind of dry run for that longer narrative, although it is true that Leslie alights in several, and one story, “The Boy Vet,” is about Peter, his med-student girlfriend, Julia, and their dog, Kiki, all central characters in “Early Work.”
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of July. See the full list. ]
“Cool for America” is animated by much the same spirit as “Early Work,” and undermined by its same shortcomings. Martin’s characters — the men especially, but Leslie too — tend to be well educated (he almost dares us to say overeducated) but aimless, certain of their genius but chronically unable to deliver on it. “My friend,” one seductress says to her besotted mark, “I think it’s time someone told you: You are not as special as you think you are.” Which makes the poor mark — “a leading editorial assistant” at an “august, maybe dying small magazine” — wonder, “Was anyone, though?”
On they go like this, sloshing through a lingering post-adolescence on what seems to be a tidal wave of drink. They can’t quite locate themselves occupationally, intellectually or even geographically; they often find themselves in ZIP codes that feel at least in part designed to amplify the disparity between their urbane sophistication and the local color. (Thus the title: Are you merely cool for Missoula, or are you cool for America?) They are often stretching for a certainty that eludes them, and Martin is good on the uneasy awareness of this: Leslie’s “big problem … was that she was still, at 27, a person without well-established and verifiable thoughts or opinions about things.” But that doesn’t stop her from being a blowhard all the same, high on the courage of her own convictions. Meeting with a reading group to discuss “War and Peace,” Leslie “argued fiercely and cheerfully about the book month after month despite clearly having only the most glancing familiarity with its contents.”
It would be a mistake to assume that Martin agrees with the assessments of his characters in their overheated, often sophomoric debates, their ironized pillow talk. He skewers them as much as he clearly enjoys them. But your enjoyment of these characters will likely depend on how sympathetic you find their particular, mostly low-grade distress. Martin’s drifters are stagy in their ornamented repartee, and self-conscious about their staginess, in a way that comments upon but doesn’t dispel it, that passes for insight but is in fact just the registering of a need for insight to be slotted in. It is self-aggrandizement that recognizes itself as a weakness and then wants credit for the recognition. It verges on heterosexual camp.
Every so often, however, intimations from an omniscient above puncture the preciousness of these reveries, and the collection is stronger for it: when the book clubber unspools insights that make clear his tale is being recalled years later; when the teenage punk rocker of “Deep Cut” nods at the judicial clerkship far off in his still-invisible future. But Martin is stingy with this retrospective clarity. Too often, he substitutes the accrual of cultural signifiers for character development, an outsourcing of observation. Leslie sizes up a near-stranger she’s agreed to attend a wedding with based on his car stereo (“She was glad Jake liked ‘Exile,’” she thinks as he plays the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” “Not that anybody didn’t”). The narrator of the title story, a Montana transplant from Back East, contends that Somerset Maugham, Buster Keaton and the Replacements are “the things that matter.” A Missoula yokel is on hand to puncture that claim as out of touch — a fair gripe, and Martin wants us to know he knows it. But in the end, the Replacements get the girl.
To their credit, these stories don’t overreach to arrive at pat conclusions. Martin often winds up to a killer ending, leaving the uncertainty to linger and his characters, if not his readers, suspended mid-muck. They lurch forward, touchingly, but not entirely satisfyingly, in their chosen directions. At the end of “The Boy Vet,” Peter finds Kiki, the lost dog (“my life,” he calls her, lest we miss the significance), and tries to find his way back home: “I paused, hoping for some kind of sign, some hint of recognition as to the right way to go, but it wasn’t forthcoming. I picked a direction and walked.” You feel Martin is going somewhere, and the prospect is tantalizing. One looks forward to “Later Work.”
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The Moral of These Stories? ‘You Are Not as Special as You Think’ - The New York Times
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