Early Work by Andrew Martin

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