I adore Andrew Martin’s first book, EARLY WORK, in a way that makes feel gnaw-my-own-arm-off crazy. I’ve read it twice, here and here. So when his second book COOL FOR AMERICA came out, I bought it straight away, even though I don’t really approve of buying hardbacks, because it is decadent.
I don’t love these short stories as much as EARLY WORK, but let’s face it, there is almost nothing I love like I love EARLY WORK. The stories are sort of similar to EARLY WORK (I just like typing the name) being about writing, and drinking, and cheating.
As one character puts it:
The pursuit of unavailable women was the closest I could get to a life’s passion.
And the book is much about the beginning of relationships, and about their endings, often overlapping. Try these various thoughts about possible romantic partners:
. . . .maybe it was his lack of anxiety about his literary status that made him so good in bed. Leave it to somebody else to pierce the human heart with punctuation
Or this, about an effort to write a grown-up email to an ex:
. . . these thoughts wouldn’t form themselves into coherent sentences on the screen, maybe because she wasn’t sure they were true. She hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgotten the ugly melodrama of their final months together and she hadn’t forgiven him for going off to Italy for a fellowship without her, like a punk-ass. The worst thing about studying art history was the artists.
There is lots of other stuff I love. Here a character is going home:
. . .he wished he could justify not returning to the primodial slop, which, no matter how hard he tried for it not to, left him dizzy with despair every time he was re-immersed in it.
I don’t especially like short stories. I don’t like being pulled into something just in time for it to end, and I don’t like that very often that ending feels awkward and forced, trying to squeeze out meaning like a difficult pimple. But despite all this I still enjoyed COOL FOR AMERICA. I can’t wait for him to write something else