Early Work
A Novel
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"What a debut! Early Work is one of the wittiest, wisest (sometimes silliest, in the best sense), and bravest novels about wrestling with the early stages of life and love, of creative and destructive urges, I’ve read in a while. The angst of the young and reasonably comfortable isn’t always pretty, but Andrew Martin possesses the prose magic to make it hilarious, illuminating, moving." —Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and The Fun Parts
For young writers of a certain temperament—if they haven’t had such notions beaten out of them by MFA programs and the Internet—the delusion persists that great writing must be sought in what W. B. Yeats once called the “foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” That’s where Peter Cunningham has been looking for inspiration for his novel—that is, when he isn’t teaching at the local women’s prison, walking his dog, getting high, and wondering whether it’s time to tie the knot with his college girlfriend, a medical student whose night shifts have become a standing rebuke to his own lack of direction. When Peter meets Leslie, a sexual adventurer taking a break from her fiancé, he gets a glimpse of what he wishes and imagines himself to be: a writer of talent and nerve. Her rag-and-bone shop may be as squalid as his own, but at least she knows her way around the shelves. Over the course of a Virginia summer, their charged, increasingly intimate friendship opens the door to difficult questions about love and literary ambition.
With a keen irony reminiscent of Sam Lipsyte or Lorrie Moore, and a romantic streak as wide as Roberto Bolaño’s, Andrew Martin’s Early Work marks the debut of a writer as funny and attentive as any novelist of his generation.
“Beautifully executed and very funny, Early Work is a sharp-eyed, sharp-voiced debut that I didn’t want to put down.” —Julia Pierpont, author of Among the Ten Thousand Things and The Little Book of Feminist Saints
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
That moment in early adulthood when life seems full of possibilities but is also incredibly scary forms the sweet spot of Martin's astute debut. Peter Cunningham, a compulsive reader and lover of literature (but not of academia), teaches in a women's prison while trying to finish writing his first novel. He has abandoned a rigorous PhD program at Columbia to follow his undergraduate lover, Julia, to medical school in Virginia, where they adopt a dog, settle in, and drift apart. Peter finds a whole new set of friends and, with time on his hands, enjoys himself with them while Julia works tirelessly. For Peter, it's the mental acknowledgement of an estrangement that causes the separation to widen. Just as these new friends take over Peter's life, the novel shifts focus, from Peter's first-person narrative to a third-person examination of Leslie, a woman who has clear romantic chemistry with Peter. The book's seven parts alternate between these two perspectives. Leslie's backstory traces her young adulthood up to the point where she meets Peter. Her path is similarly rootless, with stints in New York and Montana for graduate school. Peter keeps the relationship a secret from Julia as long as he can, with significant consequences. This is a smart and beautifully observed story about fallible people.
Customer Reviews
Man at work
3.5 stars
Author
Not the late fifties English historical novelist, but a thirty-something Armenian-American with a MFA, who used to work at New York Review of Books and has published short fiction in various cool literary journals. This is his debut novel, and has attracted favourable attention from some of the above mentioned journals.
Plot
Peter is in his late 20s, and dropped out from the Yale doctoral programme in English because, like, who needs a doctorate to write novels? He follows his live-in girlfriend Julia, a would-be poet turned medical student, to Virginia when she gets a position there. They buy a dog. She works long hours while Peter teaches composition at a local community college and associated women’s prison. In between, he gets stoned a lot and makes scant progress on his novel. Leslie is a tall ironic Texan who comes to town to work on a screenplay she has been commissioned to write, and reconsider her relationship with a “good man” back home. Cue love triangle with many literary and pop culture references.
Prose
Laconic and slick at the same time if that’s possible. Some great dialogue and commentary which is more droll than funny, e.g., “I do tend to like people in practice, even though I’ve built an airtight case against them in principle.” The bibliography, if there was one, would be awesome. (I can’t believe I used the ‘a’ word. I promise it won’t happen again.)
Characters
Protagonists are reasonably well drawn, but shallow, which I think is the point. Based on what I’ve read in interviews with Martin, there is an autobiographical element to Peter. The supporting cast of ageing millennial creative types and wannabes is everything you’d expect a supporting cast of ageing millennial creative types and wannabes to be.
Bottom line
Blessed be the fruit of yet another young writer writing about the largely self created travails of a young writer failing to get any work done because life, you know, gets in the way. What saved it for me was that Martin was taking the piss. At least I think he was.