Shallow and self-absorbed, but in a recognizable way, like the reflection of our generation. It was whiny and frustrating, but still somehow enjoyable to read about the young adult experience from deep within it. If you're a literary twenty-something, you will most likely enjoy this - and recognize parts of yourself.

“Most of my friends were superficial and unpleasant.”

I’m a sucker for certain literary themes: and the flailing writer/academic is a great favourite, so Andrew Martin’s debut novel, Early Work, drew me in. Protagonist Peter Cunningham is supposedly working on a novel, but … it’s not working out well.

Early work

The novel opens with Peter attending a party at the home of a “New Age-leaning woman named Anna whose family, through what specific brand of plunder I don’t know, owned a gigantic house out in horse country.”

Anna was magnificently curly-haired and just shy of troublingly thin, with a squished cherubic face that seemed to promise PG-13 secrets. She’s grown up in the area and had recently moved back for somewhat mysterious reasons, possibly involving a now ex-boyfriend’s arrest for dealing prescription drugs. She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely suppressed rage.

Anna’s “family compound” has the look of a “nouveau hunting lodge,” and Peter, who arrives solo as his long-term girlfriend, medical student Julia, is working, gets a good look at one of the guests through a kitchen window. The woman, Peter soon learns, is Leslie, and once they meet, an immediate banter flows:

Leslie grinned at me, the full-toothed thing, which, maybe, was the first tentative step into the abyss of the rest of my life, or whatever you want to call, it. Love.

Leslie is also a writer, and so the connections between Peter and Leslie are solidified. Peter disregards his current relationship and finds himself competing for Leslie’s attention over the dinner table. Quite soon, it’s clear that Peter’s relationship with Julia is problematic. He doesn’t care if she’s “thinking about someone else,” during sex, and while Peter considers that he’s “intellectually compatible” with Julia, he admits that “neither of us quite expected not to” have sex with “anyone else for the rest of our lives.”

Dig a little deeper and there are failed ambitions on all sides here. Julia writes poetry, but has plunged into a medical career. Peter met Julia in college, but then he later moved onto Yale and discovered that the PhD program was, for him, a horrible mistake. Deciding “novelists don’t need PhDs. They don’t need shit,” he dropped out and moved to Virginia to join Julia who was attending med school. The plan was that Peter would write the Great Novel, so as a couple, they’ve become each other’s complex excuses: his drop-out school war chest money supported Julia, and he will have the literary career Julia has turned away from. But as we all know, it’s just not that easy to write a novel let alone sell it:

the book was really a handy metaphor for tinkering with hundreds of word documents that bore a vague thematic resemblance to each other, but would never cohere into the, what, saga of fire and ice that were they imagining.

So this is why we find Peter teaching at a women’s correctional facility and chafing at his relationship with Julia.

I enjoyed parts of this novel and its take on career failures and failures in love. Peter’s voice was sharp and witty but occasionally grating. The main problem was that I really disliked the foul-mouthed Leslie and failed to see her charm. She’s a walking disaster (one of Woody Allen’s Kamikaze Women), but then when was love ever logical? Beyond that, the ending was wobbly, and it was difficult to connect with the characters who are a fairly privileged, vacuous spoiled lot.

review copy

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 10, 2018

Early Work is a well-written domestic comedy-drama. It isn't sufficiently funny to work as a comedy and the characters avoid the deep relationships that give drama to domestic life. To the extent that there’s a plot, it centers on the characters’ ever-changing and frequently overlapping sex lives, and on the ability people have to screw up their lives by chasing something they might not really want. The book has occasional moments of amusement or interest, but the story drifts along until it drifts away.

Early Work feels like an early work — the work of a writer who isn’t quite sure what he wants to say, or perhaps one who has strong writing skills but doesn't know what to do with them. There is more skill than substance on display here. The novel showcases a group of young people who are trying to figure out what the future might hold, but the story fizzles out without offering any greater insight than the possibility of starting something new in the morning.

Early Work is initially narrated by Peter Cunningham, an aspiring writer who dropped out of a PhD program at Yale to live with his girlfriend Julia, a poet who is attending medical school in Virginia so that she can earn a living. Peter has published a couple of stories but seems incapable of finishing a novel, so he is earning a living as a composition instructor at a community college, a gig that gets him a weekly teaching session at a women’s prison. At a party given by their mutual friend Anna, Peter connects with a woman named Leslie, also an aspiring writer, and perhaps the connection is stronger than it should be, given his relationship with Julia. Kate the bartender, who also writes and teaches writing, knows everyone.

Point of view shifts as the story continues, sometimes telling us the backstory of a character from a third person perspective, sometimes returning to the present and Peter’s reflections on his woeful life. The reader moves back to a time when Kate began an affair with Leslie despite Leslie’s occasional desire to be comforted by sex with men. We read about a dinner that brings together Peter, Julia, Leslie, and Leslie’s fiancé Brian, and we learn how Leslie and Brian met. Julia and Peter dissect their relationship while taking a vacation with their old friend Colin. Relationship landmarks happen in Peter’s life, but mostly he complains about his inability to write anything despite his self-identification as a writer.

The aspiring writers have witty and sophisticated conversations about literature and sex, making Early Work a literary version of Sex and the City but with fewer laughs and less interesting characters. Maybe real people actually have effortlessly witty conversations like the characters in Early Work, but conversations like these always come across to me as scripted, and that’s one of the novel’s flaws. Characters converse in a determined effort to prove how interesting they are. I think they sleep together for the same reason. Self-involved characters accuse other characters of being self-involved. Even when they catalog their long lists of failings, they are more self-pitying than insightful. They display wit in abundance but I’m not sure they have much heart. Maybe that’s the point, but reading about heartless characters gets old pretty quickly.

The characters are obnoxiously trendy in their discussions of books and music and food, but I’m not sure if Andrew Martin meant to lampoon trendiness or to showcase it as a desirable characteristic of witty people — particularly witty people who fancy themselves writers, as do most of the characters except for “local foods” guru Brian. Early Work is a short book but, despite its stylistic appeal, I struggled to get through it, primarily because I didn’t think any of its characters are worth knowing.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

A telling look at millennial would-be novelists. Pretentious, full of hubris and just all-around pains in the ass. If you enjoy that sort of thing, Martin has given you an excellent read. If you don't, you will want to slap every character (but especially Peter) silly, tell them to grow up and embrace reality and a sense of decency. Sheesh!

Smart, or do I mean smart-assed, this first novel about writing redeems itself in its last section, called Last Section, but only just. Full of booze, sex, hanging about trying to write, and half-hearted relationships, it’s a tale of a small world and seems likely to have similar appeal. Limited.

Entertaining book about the antics of Millennials. The entitlement of the characters was realistic and the dialogue was spot on with how many talk! The author did a great job! I enjoyed this one immensely!

Great read. Tender prose, beautiful story. I admire this book for its bravery anf its pacing.Totally realized characters and gorgeous writing.

Under-achieving Peter moves to Virginia with his over-achieving girlfriend Julia. They meet and befriend fellow-newcomer Leslie, whose boyfriend is still in Texas. To varying degrees they are all writers who drink, vape, drive up debt, and live in filth. We get back story on each writer in turn, loser with writer's block, virgin poet/med-student, bi-sexual published writer; and basically are subjected to the mess of their existence together and separated. "I'm not going to be stupid and reckless forever," Peter said. "Just until it stops being good material." Poor silly Peter, it never was good material to begin with.

Andrew Martin has hit it out of the park with this perceptive, breezy, at times hilarious, portrait of the generation that's come to be known as Millennials. Their self absorption is apparent, but mitigated by Peter's experiences when he teaches creative writing at a local women's prison (knowing someone who has worked in prisons as a therapist, I read these parts with great interest, and can't help but wonder if Martin himself has had this experience). He's got the language down pat, and by shifting points of view, gives the proceedings a three dimensional quality. I can't wait to see what he comes up with next.

The depth of introspection in this work leads me to believe it to be partly autobiographical. Possibly? It somehow seems reminiscent of the ‘Lost Generation’ transposed to a modern canvas. It shows a deep intellectual knowledge of this age of would-be writers engaging in nonchalant sex to while away the time between efforts at writing. The characters are engaging-from wilful to aimless to resigned and as a
B-Boomer I almost felt like sitting them all down and talking ‘sense’ to them. Apart from Julia. Poor Julia.
Thanks to NetGalley, Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Andrew Martin for the pleasure of reviewing this work.

Peter Cunningham is a hapless, floppy fish of a man. He is very far from being his finished self. Peter fancies himself as a writer but life experience for him involves drinking far too much and smoking lots of weed. He has a very patient, loving, girlfriend called Julia who already has her life together.
Into his small world of friends comes Leslie. Leslie appears freewheeling, talented and with an interesting backstory. She is a more interesting version of Peter. Peter thinks he is being really clever in setting his cap at Leslie, but it is Leslie who makes all the decisions. Everywhere he goes, there she is making herself available.
Leslie kicks her fiancée to the kerb, and she and Peter start sneaking around and having sex. Leslie is the dominant force in the beginning of this new relationship. Poor Julia is left to watch Peter changing before her eyes, although she is better off without him.
Early Work is a good exploration of how self-destructive and selfish you can be in relationships. Peter and Julia's is a starter romance, the kind you make your mistakes in. In the postscript you get the impression that Leslie has started moulding him into an actual adult.