Early Work
A Novel
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3.5 • 43 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
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.
