Cool for America by Andrew Martin

Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on July 7, 2020

Relationships are complicated. When they aren’t working, they suck. That’s one theme that runs through the stories collected in Cool for America. We are fundamentally incapable of communicating truths to each other, of understanding our parents or partners or feeling understood and appreciated in the way we hope to be. Or maybe the problem (as a character suggests in “A Dog Named Jesus”) is that we are so rarely on the same page at the same time: whatever one partner wants to do (go the Farmer’s Market) is the opposite of the other partner's desire (stay home and read a book). A different character in that story decides that of the “many ways to avoid stupid, crippling loneliness,” the best is to “complicate your attachments to such a degree that they hardly seemed like attachments at all.”

Some of the stories in this collection are set in Missoula, Montana. Characters, mostly transplants from more cosmopolitan places, tend to talk about wolves, forestry, conservation, music, and books they haven’t read. The characters in a few stories overlap. The most memorable of those is a snarky woman in her mid-20s named Leslie who has an affinity for gin. We learn in “No Cops” that she was “thoroughly and expensively educated” but put all of that behind her to work as a copy editor at an alternative newspaper where, she assumes, she’s not expected to turn up sober. Leslie moves from sexual encounter to sexual encounter through the stories, sometimes with short-term boyfriends, occasionally with a stranger. Despite being opinionated, she considers herself “a person without well-established and verifiable thoughts and opinions about anything.” She promises herself she’ll start writing but she’s having difficulty finding purpose or direction. Leslie declares in “A Dog Named Jesus” that she needs to leave Missoula, a place where she is rotting and forgotten. Whether she will do so is up in the air.

The protagonist of “Attention” is a lonely woman who regards her loneliness as a matter of choice. She worries that “the significant disasters of life — illness, marriage, children” approach “less forthrightly than, say, a friend offering her some really excellent cocaine.”

The title story, and my favorite in the volume, is narrated by a man who occasionally travels to Montana to teach a photography class and ends up stuck there on crutches. His friendship with his climbing partner becomes strained when the climbing partner’s wife becomes sexually aggressive, although the wife finds the mess she caused to be “clarifying.”

My second favorite, perhaps because it is so different from all the rest, is “The Boy Vet.” The corrupt vet wants the narrator to pay for surgery for an injured corgi and then to adopt it, an act that the narrator knows will not sit well with his living partner. I also admired “Deep Cut,” about two friends who go to a hardcore concert and sort of have each other’s backs when the crowd becomes both rough and unexpectedly kind. The injured narrator decides against stitches because “preserving the evidence of the wound might keep me from turning my youth into cheap nostalgia. As if a scar, of all things, was capable of that.”

A couple in “The Charged Party” have experimentally reunited after a six-month separation. They are trying to find a mutual path to parenting their OCD daughter. The father has trust issues because his partner had an affair, but since he can no longer trust any women, he might as well live with but not trust the mother of his child. Maybe she’s really a decent person, a thought he prefers to the possibility that “she was a fundamentally different person from the one I’d always thought her to be,” a thought “so painful that I tried not to let myself entertain it too often.

The other stories are less interesting. “Bad Feelings” is essentially a story about a young man who is having a bad day, perhaps as a precursor to a bad life. In “With the Christopher Kids,” Steven and his sister Patricia are having a bad Christmas weekend with their mother, as part of bad lives in which they switch off being active drug addicts and recovering addicts, an arrangement that always leaves one of them sufficiently sober to help the other. “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” focuses on the members of a War and Peace reading group who are “building these little, yuck, networks for future success by hosting each other in their apartments around the city for the better part of a year under the pretext of discussing Russian literature.” A relationship in “Short Swoop, Long Line” seems to be going well until it goes off track when the man takes note of the bad behavior exhibited by the woman’s child.

Andrew Martin built his first novel, Early Work, out of young, directionless characters. Some of the stories collected in Cool for America were published before the novel, so it might not be suprising that they are cut from the same cloth.

Taken together, Martin’s stories make an argument for avoiding human contact (even before the pandemic gave us no choice) to avoid the kinds of complications that the characters endure or mishandle. The stories are dark, driven by characters who are largely aimless, but they have the virtue of honesty. There are no false promises here that life will get better. Yet there is always a sense that one day, the characters might grow up and find themselves. The characters know that the future is unknowable but they at least seem to have the sense that the future might hold something better if they can gain some wisdom and maturity instead of growing older without branching off from the same uncertain path.

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