PositiveThe London Review of BooksAndrew Martin’s Early Work functions simultaneously as a celebratory autofiction about literary life in the United States and an indictment of the generation that populates it ... Early Work is also a love story, or a story of infidelity and throwing over someone you love for someone you just met and find more exciting. Which means that it’s, on the sly, a novel about the ways we judge character and substance, the codes we live by or fail to live by. Many of the observations are close to the bone: the embarrassingly slight attempts at self-improvement...the social observations ... Andrew Martin isn’t Bret Easton Ellis taking eight hundred pages to demonstrate that the world of high fashion is a bit shallow. Early Work is humane, and the characters are lovable even as they get blitzed in dive bars on a Wednesday afternoon, sleep with one another’s partners and otherwise sabotage themselves. Every generation has a fatal flaw, and ours is narcissism ... At one point an ex-boyfriend of Leslie’s is described as being so cynical that he’s circled back to sincerity, and this is the shape, or the trajectory, of the novel too.
