Self-Aware Self-Awareness: An Interview with Andrew Martin
The characters in Early Work, Andrew Martin’s debut novel, are poets, playwrights, film buffs, grad students, adjunct college instructors, thirtyish, liberal, well-read. They like drinking, screwing, smoking cigarettes, Michael Jackson, Kanye West, tapas. But the simple act of liking anything isn’t simple for them; most of their pleasures are guilty ones. “Yeah, I’m pretty into monotonous drug rap right now,” says one of the characters.
“I mean, like everybody. I guess it’s the usual racist thing, where white people like it because it takes their worst suspicions about minorities and confirms them in lurid and entertaining ways?”
“Yeah, that’s why I like it,” I said. “Racist reasons mostly. I’m not thrilled about the misogyny, though. In my experience, you don’t really want to be the guy bringing up the genius of Yeezus in a room full of women. Even if someone loves it she’ll probably wonder what your problem with women is.”
There’s a sort of cultural calorie counting at work, as if Martin’s characters were compulsively glancing at the side of the box to see what sociocultural contaminants might be hiding in their media—before indulging anyway.
The story follows Peter Cunningham, an affable slacker who’s dropped out of Yale’s Ph.D program in English (“Were we supposed to read these books? Were my fellow students genuine in their stupid ideas about literature?”) to go live in Virginia with his longtime girlfriend, a medical student named Julia, and work on
