A Pandemic Novel About Writers, Friendship & Desire

Andrew Martin is a much-beloved downtown novelist based in New York. His first novel, Early Work, was called “marvelous” by the New York Times, and his subsequent short-story collection Cool for America was described as “simultaneously sharp and self-lacerating and generous and agreeable.” When I first pitched this interview, I wrote that “He writes about losers, a bit like Raymond Carver or Denis Johnson except stripped of romance, which, in turn, makes his characters seem more human and more approachable.” I still think this is basically true, though I should add the caveat that Andrew’s losers tend to graduate from boarding schools and MFA programs, rather than the School of Hard Knocks. Perhaps that accounts for the lack of romance!