Martin’s fictional universe of drugs and disappointment, cleverness and self-doubt, shot through with flashes of crackling lucidity, is funny but empathetic toward its deeply flawed characters. Reminiscent of Denis Johnson’s beautiful and insightful 1992 debut, Jesus’s Son, Cool for America thrives in the same gorgeous space between chaos and contemplation. In short: Bad people can be good, and they’re generally fun to read about ... Martin is maybe at his best when wringing as much meaning as he can from the collision of East Coast manners and Montana’s rough charm ... Taut, entertaining, sharp on literature and the way we live now, Cool for America is relentlessly pleasing and keen in a way that might make you crave more from Martin on the world beyond his established territory. Everything that falls under his purview feels simultaneously familiar and utterly original.
Cool for America is animated by much the same spirit as Early Work, and undermined by its same shortcomings. Martin’s characters—the men especially, but Leslie too—tend to be well educated (he almost dares us to say overeducated) but aimless, certain of their genius but chronically unable to deliver on it ... They are often stretching for a certainty that eludes them, and Martin is good on the uneasy awareness of this ... your enjoyment of these characters will likely depend on how sympathetic you find their particular, mostly low-grade distress. Martin’s drifters are stagy in their ornamented repartee, and self-conscious about their staginess, in a way that comments upon but doesn’t dispel it, that passes for insight but is in fact just the registering of a need for insight to be slotted in. It is self-aggrandizement that recognizes itself as a weakness and then wants credit for the recognition. It verges on heterosexual camp. Every so often, however, intimations from an omniscient above puncture the preciousness of these reveries, and the collection is stronger for it ... To their credit, these stories don’t overreach to arrive at pat conclusions. Martin often winds up to a killer ending, leaving the uncertainty to linger and his characters, if not his readers, suspended mid-muck ... You feel Martin is going somewhere, and the prospect is tantalizing. One looks forward to 'Later Work.'
A self-aware perspective...is all to the good, essential even, but it comes with a cost: deeply felt emotion, unobstructed by the restless voice in one’s head ... Martin is not as torn as [Ben] Lerner. He is looser, less earnest, and often very funny. If his fiction is wrapped in self-awareness, the swaddling is soft. But it is still there, resulting not only in fictional creatures who are emotionally stunted, but in fiction that is emotionally stunted, too. And it is this, not privilege per se, that would seem to be the big problem for literature about being white ... His prose is smooth and unfussy ... it’s not really on the sentence level where Martin excels, but in the book’s easygoing flow ... It is all voice, no lyricism. Martin, like many other American writers of his generation, is not one to strain for anything so gauche as poetry ... There are, thankfully, different kinds of stories in this collection than Martin’s go-to story of the scruffy writerly type who may or may not be in the midst of screwing up his life. There is a tale about a pair of sibling drug addicts that is by turns horrifying and amusing ... The alcohol and drug abuse is less cheerfully innocent in this book than the previous one ... there is the same carefully cultivated nonchalance, a sense that even the emptiness of these people’s lives is a bit shallow ... There is no Joycean epiphany, no god descending from the proverbial rafters. There is only life in media res, and the result is a successful translation of autofiction, which we normally associate with multi-volume quasi-autobiography ... it is hard not to feel that Martin himself is a casualty of this ironic distance, that the author suffers from the same debilitating affliction as his characters.
In Cool for America, Martin yields further to the times—one might say he shares his platform by all puny means available, by which I mean more of his narrators are women ... Martin’s writing cuts close to his own bone ... Existential dramas play out in bleak sentences that delight in the same ways a good bra or jockstrap might ... Martin invites all this settling to devastate us with its smallness ... He’s a deliberate writer, so it’s worth asking why his narrators could all use the same attitude adjustment ... Again and again, Martin favors the same defects and charms in his characters, who harbor both superiority and inferiority complexes, and might even think this makes them unique. Martin seems intent on demonstrating by repetition that it does not ... These stories have me champing at the bit for what one narrator calls 'a less mediated life.' Compared to Early Work, these stories pay more mature shrift to the question of why a proto-writer might not write ... I suspect he wants readers to wonder whether the narrators here are proxy targets for self-loathing. That’s one explanation for why they all sound the same, for the choice words and preemptive digs so precise and pervasive they seem, on some level, to be self-directed. Is Martin grooming himself for an elaborate and circular neg? It’s a better look to humiliate your darlings than to kill them. Especially if you have trouble making up your mind.
The author understands the intimacy a narrator’s self-disclosure can create with a reader and, sprawling and unencumbered, how great a distance a paragraph or even a single sentence can cover. His characters are at once affable and distraught, a polarity that grants each story an enticing tension ... Martin’s most astonishing power is his ability to sublimate a character’s internal frustrations into an external representation of reality — a cathartic, frequently amusing projection of the self onto the world’s brutal canvas.
... 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.
Martin’s writing is as light and lively as his characters are frozen and hesitant. Frequently hilarious, Martin’s stories are insightful, and the characters are both truthful and authentic ... Each story rings with wry, modern truth even as the characters are frustrated at every turn.
Martin captures young adults’ aimless searches for stability in this bleak, revealing collection ... Moments of cynical humor pop up amid drug use, tumultuous relationships, or other self-defeating outlets for the characters’ creative and personal frustrations. Though the people begin to blend together, each story has at least one or two standout, bleakly funny lines. Martin’s sardonic tales are decent, if not breathtaking.
