RaveThe Telegraph (UK)It’s serious work, and precisely through being so ordinary, it becomes deeply affecting ... Gentle ... Aiken has a formidable task in conveying all this beautiful subtlety, but he manages. In particular, he captures perfectly the texture of Helle’s sentences, their lilting rhythm and slow focus.
RaveThe Telegraph (UK)Exhaustively researched and beautifully written...a masterpiece of biography.
Andrew Martin
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.
