PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books... captures some of the comical pointlessness and unique struggles of millennials. The collection is a brilliant, honest read that will have you laughing out of both appreciation and discomfort — not from the awkwardness of the prose but from the hope that you don’t find yourself relating too much to the stories’ often unattractive characters ... what makes Martin’s characters so wretchedly apathetic is their ferocious self-awareness ... Still, the underachievement of the characters can’t help but feel a bit disappointing, at least insofar as the academic exposure that afforded them the opportunity to manifest various artistic hopes are left wanting ... somehow the collection doesn’t feel like a drag. Instead, there’s a visceral feeling of sympathy for all the characters’ positions in life; you don’t find yourself blaming them for their underachievements. Martin’s attempt at physiological sketches in a series of coming-of-age stories succeeds ... It’s possible that this work makes a generational point — one that hits almost unbearably close to home for someone in their late 20s or early 30s but might be indiscernible to anyone over 50. Nonetheless, it’s all part of a conversation I feel I’ve been having for years ... If there were a flaw in Martin’s work, it would be repetitiveness. It’s not that the stories or plots themselves are at all similar — far from it. But the tone and cultural idiosyncrasies are a bit overdone and at times feel cliched by their overuse. This is maybe why one never feels anything nearing attachment to any of the characters. They all blend into one amorphous cloud of superficial irony ... But Martin’s collection should still be unequivocally praised. If not for its individual characters, then for the extensive and various ways in which he is able to capture a particular modern milieu... Few have portrayed this with such brutal honesty ... it must be said that the work in its entirety is unquestionably fun to read ... Surely Martin’s finger remains as close to the pulse of millennials as any other contemporary writer could claim to have. And whether his next work is yet another collection of youthful, ironic vignettes, or a more structured novel portraying an older generation, Martin will, I think, deliver greater cultural insight.
