Cool for America: Stories

by Andrew Martin

Overview

Expanding the world of his classic-in-the-making debut novel Early Work, Andrew Martin’s Cool for America is a hilarious collection of overlapping stories that explores the dark zone between artistic ambition and its achievement

The collection is bookended by the misadventures of Leslie, a young woman (first introduced in Early Work) who moves from New York to Missoula, Montana to try to draw herself out of a lingering depression, and, over the course of the book, gains painful insight into herself through a series of intense friendships and relationships.

Other stories follow young men and women, alone and in couples, pushing hard against, and often crashing into, the limits of their abilities as writers and partners. In one story, two New Jersey siblings with substance-abuse problems relapse together on Christmas Eve; in another, a young couple tries to make sense of an increasingly unhinged veterinarian who seems to be tapping, deliberately or otherwise, into the unspoken troubles between them. In tales about characters as they age from punk shows and benders to book clubs and art museums, the promise of community acts—at least temporarily—as a stay against despair.

Running throughout Cool for America is the characters’ yearning for transcendence through art: the hope that, maybe, the perfect, or even just the good-enough sentence, can finally make things right.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250798640
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/06/2021
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	1,037,733
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.73(d)

About the Author

Andrew Martin's reviews and essays have been published in The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, VICE, and elsewhere. His debut novel, Early Work, was published in 2018. He lives in New York with his partner Laura and their dog, Bonnie.

Table of Contents

No Cops 3

With the Christopher Kids 29

Childhood, Boyhood, Youth 49

The Changed Party 71

Attention 95

Cool for America 121

Short Swoop, Long Line 139

The Boy Vet 169

Deep Cut 193

Bad Feelings 213

A Dog Named Jesus 229

Acknowledgments 257

Editorial Reviews

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.” —Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times

“[S]imultaneously sharp and self-lacerating and generous and agreeable . . . Cool for America is animated by much the same spirit as Early Work . . . You feel Martin is going somewhere, and the prospect is tantalizing.” —Matthew Schneier, The New York Times Book Review

"Martin strikes me as less of a kind with Roth or Foster Wallace or Franzen and more decisively a descendant of the great Ann Beattie . . . Like Beattie, Martin compassionately chronicles the sorrows and sex lives of drifting overeducated malcontents . . . In Martin’s vision, there is something borderline spiritual in the millennial’s desire to consider themselves beholden to forces outside their control." —Jennifer Schaffer, The Nation

"Martin has emerged as a leading chronicler of millennial ennui in contemporary America . . . [his] 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." —Kirkus (starred)

"If you’re a fan of Sally Rooney novels, try Andrew Martin’s Early Work. Martin is neither female nor Irish but he scratches the same itch as Rooney, with cerebral characters and tender discoveries and enough acid to keep the thing balanced. Martin’s follow-up is a collection for short stories that explores the search for transcendence through art." —Molly Young, Vulture ("29 Books We Can’t Wait to Read This Summer")

"If you read Martin’s excellent debut novel Early Work, you will recognize the themes (millennial ennui, underemployment, overeducation, a tendency to think too hard and do too little) of his winning first collection—and perhaps some characters (Leslie, Kenny, even Kiki and Scruggs). Mostly published in The Paris Review, these stories are perceptive slices-of-anxiety that will be uncomfortably, ecstatically recognizable to anyone who has ever considered themselves an intellectual—especially if it was sometime in the 2010s." —Emily Temple, LitHub ("Best New Books to Read This Summer")

"Nothing really happens in the stories in Cool for America, and then they just stop. There is no Joycean epiphany, no god descending from the proverbial rafters. There is only life in medias res, and the result is a successful translation of autofiction, which we normally associate with multi-volume quasi-autobiography, into a short story form." —Ryu Spaeth, New Republic


"Martin probes the inertia, self-doubt, and outright shiftlessness that is the prerequisite for artistic creation." —The Millions

"Cool for America serves up glimpses of life in the nation nowadays, and Martin suggests — like the sandcastle — that we are in a world of dazed impermanence. Hardly a portrait of glory from sea to shining sea, these tales drop in on estranged, lost, and overwhelmed people . . . an amusingly sardonic look at this era, which is clearly proving to be an uneasy one, no?" —Drew Hart, Artsfuse

“Remarkable . . . Martin has a real talent for highlighting the absurdity of life while never condescending to his characters. Every story in Cool for America is smart, stylish and a testament to Martin’s keen observations on the human condition.” —Michael Schaub, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Andrew Martin’s 2018 debut novel, Early Work, offered a pitch perfect tale of desultory millennials, becoming (or trying to become) writers while sleeping their way to new adventures. The overlapping stories in Martin’s new collection, Cool for America, promise many of the same pleasures that his, uh, earlier work provided: sharp dialogue, meditations on art and artmaking, and colorful depictions of a young, creative milieu." —Alina Cohen, Observer ("5 Most Anticipated Books")

"Andrew Martin's Cool for America is a collection as intensely pleasurable as it is uncomfortably potent. I felt myself growing uneasy as I turned the pages—each cheerfully aimless, morally compromised, defensively witty character cutting closer and closer to the bone. Martin's stories are queasily plausible—or they would be if they weren't also so funny and fun to read." —Miranda Popkey, author of Topics of Conversation

"The characters are real, the meltdowns (yes, a family vacation blowup) and themes are too, and Cool for America serves as an all-too-real glimpse into our everyday." —Ladders

"Overeducated and undermined, the women and men in Andrew Martin's stories fortify themselves with beer, weed, intensely felt verdicts about music and literature, and messing around with people they probably shouldn't be messing around with. Martin's prose is as melancholy and ruthless as Raymond Carver's, and his wit is as dark and sharp as Mary Robison's or Donald Antrim's." —Caleb Crain, author of Overthrow and Necessary Errors

From the Publisher

05/18/2020

Martin (Early Work) captures young adults’ aimless searches for stability in this bleak, revealing collection. In “The Changed Party,” during a rained-out vacation on the Jersey shore, Lisa and Gary, freshly reunited following a separation, discover their eight-year-old daughter Amanda’s compulsive habit of picking through the garbage and are troubled by a friend’s drinking. In the title story, an unnamed assistant professor spending the summer in Missoula, Mont., wrestles with a powerful attraction to his friend’s wife, who helps him recuperate from a broken leg. In “The Boy Vet,” a baby-faced veterinarian pressures a softhearted literature PhD dropout to pay for emergency surgery on a stray dog. The protagonist of “Bad Feelings” distracts himself from his mom’s surgery by going to “the third sequel to a blockbuster adaptation of a young adult book series” despite having not seen the others, and loses his keys in the empty theater. 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. (July)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2020-04-13
A collection of stories that document suburban angst and the burdens of being too young and too smart for your own good.

Martin has emerged as a leading chronicler of millennial ennui in contemporary America; his new collection includes two stories featuring Leslie, a character from his acclaimed debut novel, Early Work(2018). The 11 stories all feature young people struggling to find authentic connections to friends, family, work, and culture in a modern America not particularly interested in them or their opinions. The settings range across the United States, from Missoula to New York to suburban landscapes that could be just about anywhere. None of the protagonists are likable in a traditional sense, but they’re all trying to do their best in a time that feels like the twilight of an empire. The characters suffer from various anxieties, addictions, and maladies, but primary among the things that ail them is a cruel awareness that they’re not actually suffering. When thinking about her anxiety over the state of the world and politics, Cassie realizes that “the anxiety was tolerable. She could, to her relief and regret, live with it.” The protagonists of these stories know their suburban angst is, in reality, quite shallow, which just makes them feel worse. Each character suffers from the knowledge that no matter what they’re doing there’s something better and more satisfying out there somewhere. “The big problem that Leslie had, as far as she could tell, was that she was still, at twenty-seven, a person without well-established and verifiable thoughts or opinions about things.” She handles this feeling by drinking with friends and stumbling into relationships that leave all involved parties exhausted and puzzled. Martin’s writing, however, 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.

Kirkus Reviews