Parker Tarun
Interview with Andrew Martin
I read Andrew Martin’s fantastic new story collection, Cool for America (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2020), in a state of rapture like the one I experienced reading his debut, Early Work (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018). The pleasures of that novel—its humor, its psychological acuity, its ear for contemporary American speech—carry over to the short form. Many of its characters return, too. Early Work’s anti-femme fatale, Leslie, features heavily in Cool for America. The novel’s narrator, Peter, gets a story, too. All of which is to say, if you liked Early Work, you’ll have a grand time with Martin’s latest.
But my context for reading the collection couldn’t have been more different. By then, COVID-19 had forced me and most of New York into quarantine. Unlike Martin’s characters, I was seeing very little of other people aside from my significant other. Generally speaking, a Martin character is fleeing their significant other so that they can rhapsodize sarcastically with almost-friends, acquaintances they dislike, and strangers with hook-up potential. They are over-educated coastal types, though they have often transplanted to Missoula, where Martin attended graduate school. Many of them are artists—insofar as being an artist means talking about art. Following their misadventures while indoors, I found these characters’ social performances heightened, their secret longing for emotional self-reliance all the more urgent. In one of the stories, a character wonders about a man she’s interested in: “The central question about him was whether or not his relative lack of first-rate entertainment value (as measured by quips, theories, etc.) was made up for by reservoirs of feelings and insights that were too subtle to be revealed in this slam-bang atmosphere.” Many of Cool for America’s characters are rich in theories and quips, but Martin knows this currency can only get them so far. Leslie, who develops a reservoir of feeling and insight, not as quip-compensation but as a quip-corrective, would ultimately do okay in isolation. The rest of Martin’s ensemble might struggle.
The author himself seems like a social creature, though he’s less intimidating than the strong personalities in his fiction. When we spoke over the phone, I was startled by his warmth. He laughs easily, which would be less remarkable if his fiction wasn’t so funny. Despite the fact that Martin was the subject of our interview, he several times expressed curiosity about me. In retrospect, his affability makes sense. His fiction concerns the paradox all writers face: To write, you need life experience, but you also need to hide from the world. I called expecting a quip-happy millennial bon vivant. Instead, I got a sensitive writer less concerned with the entertainment value of others than their reservoirs of feeling.
Martin holds an MFA from the University of Montana. His stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, Harper’s, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Quarantine seems like a place where your characters would really suffer. They don’t like to isolate.
ANDREW MARTIN: Well, they don’t mind isolating together. As long as there’s more than one of them and ready access to booze, I imagine they could make something happen. Self-isolation, no. That would be a problem. There’s a jokey but serious exchange in Early Work, where Leslie asks Peter, “What do you actually care about?” and he replies “People.” These characters aren’t really able to articulate what they want out of life, but they know whatever it is comes from interaction. It comes from pushing against other people. The actual threat of COVID is top of mind for me because my partner is a hospital doctor and I have older parents and whatnot, but when I zoom out, what makes me most sad is the loss of comfort of being around other people. The reason I live in New York is so I can be around people.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Isolation—a less radical version of isolation—seems to be the natural stopping point for your characters. Early Work ends when Leslie skips out on a social opportunity and decides to write, instead. “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth” has a similar denouement.
ANDREW MARTIN: Right. The novel and the story collection are both in part about this over-discussed paradox of the writer’s life. You have to go out and do things to get “material,” but then you somehow have to spend days, weeks, months, years, by yourself to actually write. I’ve known people who are incredible conversationalists and really smart, but they don’t have that thing where you can set yourself off from society long enough to actually do the work. It’s something I’ve struggled with throughout my life, too. And a lot of us have a desperate need to be around others but are, at the same time, socially awkward and anxious, so we’re constantly self-interrogating, trying to figure out how socializing is “too much,” trying to calibrate what’s useful to one’s work and what isn’t.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The dramatic irony of Early Work is that its existence is a testament to the kind of work ethic Peter lacks. I think when people try to affiliate you with that narrator, they’re missing that key component.
ANDREW MARTIN: The novel and some of the stories rely on that meta-narrative—the tension between what is physically on the page in front of you and what you’re being told about it. I think that’s a productive tension. I’m thinking about my position now, writing a new book, and it might not be so ripe with potential. It might not be so interesting to write about a writer who’s published two books and is struggling to write his third. To me, it’s much more interesting to follow someone like Peter, who has not and probably will never write a book.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When readers identify you with Peter, does that frustrate you?
ANDREW MARTIN: No, I don’t mind it. It can be fun unless the reader in question is a scandalized older family member. When people say, “Oh my gosh, how could you write that you did these terrible things?” I will gently point them to some of the things that make it clear that Early Work is not a chronicle of my life. But I also derive energy as a writer from playing with that expectation, leaning into the possibility that it is me. Something like what Philip Roth is doing in the books that feature characters named “Philip Roth” doing things that he clearly didn’t do. (Or did he?) Maybe the real thing I’m thinking when I act like a nice, sweet person is something closer to Peter: that everyone’s full of shit and I’m the best person ever. Or maybe I’m not hiding that as well as I think I am. If you actually dislike your characters, I don’t think you can write well about them. Or at least I don’t know if I could. Some writers get away with that kind of rage at their creations, but it’s a hard thing to do.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Like who?
ANDREW MARTIN: At Ottessa Moshfegh’s best, there’s a punk energy in her negation. The classic example would be Bernhard, but I think his bile can be a lot to take after a while. The Salvadoran writer Horacio Castellanos Moya is aggressively Bernhardian, mostly to great effect, though you want to take a shower after you read him. A writer I really love is Jen George. She has an amazing recent book, The Babysitter at Rest. She writes these grotesque, nightmarish stories about young women failing at life. There’s a lot of inward-directed rage that I think is really fantastic. Halle Butler, in a more realist mode, captures some of that same feeling. George and Butler are also both really funny, which seems necessary to pull off that kind of nihilism.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: A lot of characters can’t withstand that level of misanthropy from their author. But writing characters with too much sympathy can also kill them on the page. Your main characters seem nicely balanced. I feel as though you’re slightly exasperated by them but also feel a warmth toward them.
ANDREW MARTIN: I think about this a lot. I probably overthink it. Since the novel came out, people have asked me, “How can you spend all this time with these awful people?” I’ve had to invent an answer, because the truth is I don’t find them so awful. “Exasperating” is the perfect word for it. If I found them awful, I don’t think I would spend all this time writing in their voices.
I think one of the things that redeems the characters in Early Work is that, while they might be self-obsessed, they care about art and making art. They care about things outside themselves. They’re not just in it for the money. Granted, you can talk about the privilege of that, but a lot of the privileged people I know are obsessed with making money and buying nice stuff. My characters are more like monks for literature and film and music. I think that’s admirable and worth preserving, even if there are inevitable blind spots and failings that come with that. I’m not a member of Generation X, but I think my characters have a Gen-X hangover and probably have more in common with that generation’s attitudes than millennial ones. Maybe that’s what being an “elderly millennial” is all about.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: There’s a line in “No Cops”: “But she didn’t want to contribute to the prevailing idea that everyone born after 1984 operated in a sealed vacuum of good intentions without recourse to actual knowledge.”
ANDREW MARTIN: To be fair, we are pretty dumb. But the other part of that line is that there’s a difference between being nice and being good. The confusion of those things bugs me. Like, I know some good people who are jerks. It’s fine. They help other people. Their politics are good. And they’re kind of unpleasant sometimes. Maybe they don’t take certain things seriously that they’re supposed to take seriously. But there’s not one way of being a good person or being a person worthy of attention.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: It gives me some comfort to hear you say this. When other readers express contempt toward Peter or Leslie, I almost feel as though I’ve read a different book than them.
ANDREW MARTIN: People call Early Work a satire sometimes, and I don’t correct them because, even though I don’t think it’s really a satire, the characters’ position in the world is given a kind of ironic topspin by the narrator’s perspective. I think that the narrator’s inability to see that he’s just as guilty of the sins he’s pointing out is what keeps it from being a satire? But I don’t know if that would pass muster in a lit class. I’m aware that, if you zoom all the way out, the book is commenting on self-obsession or unkindness. The criticism of the characters is there; it’s just not the whole thing. But one of the great things about fiction is not having to choose precisely what your moral position is on the goings-on that you’re relaying. It’s not essay writing, and even when it contains elements of that, it doesn’t have to be “your position.” Plausible deniability!
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Cool for America’s stories often borrow people and settings from Early Work. It’s the coastal-intellectuals-bedding-down-in-Missoula equivalent of Yoknapatawpha County. What kinds of stories were you writing before you moved to Montana for your MFA?
ANDREW MARTIN: Going to Montana was one of the most important experiences of my writing life. Before that, I was writing a lot about New York, where I lived, Jersey, where I grew up. I went to Columbia for undergraduate and then worked at the New York Review of Books. I was trying and mostly failing to write what I thought of broadly as “New York stories”: that-time-we-wentto-the-art-gallery-and-saw-this-weird-thing-and-then-there-was-a-blizzard-andthen-we-got-drunk-and-I-was-sad. Classic Manhattan in your early twenties stuff. There were a few pieces before graduate school that I was proud of, but I kind of thought of them as one-offs and didn’t really pursue them.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: When did you start writing the Missoula stories?
ANDREW MARTIN: I think I started working on the first one, “Cool for America,” the summer between my first and second year of graduate school. I turned it in for a class taught by Bill Kittredge, the legendary Western writer, and he basically told me I’d written a New York story that happened to be set in Montana, and that seemed about right. So I think, after my first year at Montana, I developed a better sense of what I was doing. It was a process of loosening up for me, to some extent. I was pretty productive from the start, but a lot of that time was spent writing emo stories about young men struggling to find themselves. Too much early Fitzgerald and not enough Pat Hobby-era Fitzgerald. I’m basically an earnest person, but my writing is weakest when I’m self-serious. Whenever I’m stuck, I have to remind myself I’m allowed to be funny and that I’m good at being funny.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How would you describe your voice?
ANDREW MARTIN: It’s a self-protective cynicism or fake world-weariness. It’s the voice of somebody who thinks he’s seen it all but really hasn’t. The huge influence on the title story of Cool for America (so much so that certain parts are almost plagiarism) was my teacher David Gates, whose work I love. Honestly, the initial prompt for that story might’ve been, “Write a David Gates story.” It mutated over time, but the DNA is there. David’s influence was very strong on me. If you were to put the collection’s stories in the order they were written in, you could see it as a quest to move away from his influence. Probably with diminishing returns.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Do you know what Gates think of those stories that are modeled after him?
ANDREW MARTIN: He’s always been outwardly supportive, but maybe deep down he’s thinking, “Fuck this kid.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: How do you get started on a story? Character? Image? A phrase? I’d be particularly interested to hear about “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,” since it’s the newest thing.
ANDREW MARTIN: I keep notebooks, both real ones and on really lousy apps on my phone. Most of the entries are brief, almost always a phrase or a premise. The thing that most often turns into a story is a jolt of perspective on something that’s happened to me or something I’ve been thinking about, filtered through some aesthetic lens. A recent one in my phone is “Write something that’s like a backstage musical but about an experimental theater group, weird blurring of life and group, showstoppers, emotional incoherence.” Promising! “Childhood, Boyhood” probably started similarly. I was really in a War and Peace book club in my early years in New York, and about a decade later, it suddenly occurred to me that that would be a good backdrop for an ensemble cast-story that plays with time. It sounds kind of dumb when I say it like that. I think, since I do often start off with something based in my life—a friend of mine broke his leg while we were playing pickup soccer, I went to a crazy wedding at a hot springs—the problem often becomes about getting enough distance on whatever the inciting event was to write something new and different about it. Most of the time the only true thing about a story is the premise, and the rest is sort of an improvisation on that
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Leslie is one of the heroes for Early Work and appears a great deal in Cool for America. How did she come to be?
ANDREW MARTIN: I think her first appearance was in the story “A Dog Named Jesus.” The initial prompt was a line in my notebook that came from my partner, Laura: “Write a female Huck Finn.” I didn’t entirely know what that meant, but the character evolved from there. I took it to mean, essentially, “agent of chaos,” a character who is fundamentally active rather than passive. People who know my sister Sara have definitely noted that Leslie contains elements of her. Sara’s a brilliant writer who, in her younger days, was something of a wild child. “What would Sara do (in 2009)?” was a decent compass to steer by. But the not-so-secret secret is that, especially in the novel, Leslie is autobiographical, probably more than Peter is. I smuggled some of my most honest writing into Leslie’s consciousness, so it could be more disguised.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Why does it need to be disguised?
ANDREW MARTIN: One of the hardest things about writing for me is creating the sense of remove necessary to create fiction and not just watered-down memoir. Leslie became a useful doppelgänger who could say and do things I wouldn’t. She’s always written in a close third; I can’t write in first-person with that character. I think having that distance allows for more honesty. It’s worth noting that all of the first person narrators in both books are male characters, but they have a version of that distance, too. I have to give them some qualities I don’t share—the Christopher kid is a cokehead, Peter dropped out of graduate school, the guy in “The Changed Party” is a father. To get them talking and behaving the way I want, they need to take on these outsized qualities, to assert themselves in egotistical ways.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I love the Leslie chapters in Early Work. This must be, in part, because of their economy, their completeness. They are their own little thing, such that you could imagine them standing alone. Same goes for Peter’s. I guess my question is why you’ve embedded the Leslie interludes in the Peter story.
ANDREW MARTIN: On a formal level, I think those sections make the book more complex and interesting. They complicate the central narrative, and they provide something to cut the astringency of Peter’s voice. But it happened organically while I was writing. I’d been working on the book for a few months and Peter’s voice had started to bug me. I wanted a break from it. I started writing the first Leslie section thinking I was going to need to come up with a sort of Sebaldian frame for it eventually. “Leslie told me, one night, about the man she dated when she first moved to New York. He was thin and bald, she said, not at all the kind of man she usually dated, etc.” But it turned out the section break— more like a jump cut—was more effective, and ultimately I think the ambiguity is more interesting.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Was the Leslie you wrote in the stories always the Leslie in the novel?
ANDREW MARTIN: It wasn’t initially clear to me that it was the same character. Bolaño became a really useful model for me in that regard. His books share characters—by name, at least—but there are competing versions of what those characters have done and who they are. In The Savage Detectives, for example, there are all these competing narratives about the two main characters, but he doesn’t decide or insist on which version is “true.” And then versions of those characters appear across his stories and other novels. Part of that is deliberate. Part of it is probably that he was writing fast and a lot of his work was published posthumously. But I like the blurring effect this creates. It’s a strange simulacrum of how we understand people, who we meet at different junctures of their lives, in different settings. They’re almost entirely different people depending on the situation. Even though Leslie behaves more or less the same in Peter’s first-person narration and her own sections, the blurring gives you the opportunity to identify with her as a character. You can kind of fill in the blanks. For Peter, of course, she’s an object of desire, and I wanted readers to feel like they could identify with her outside of that perspective as well.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I thought of Proust just now as you were talking, and I know you’re a Proust nut, too. Proust’s theory seems to be that we don’t change much and that the drama of our lives has less to do with changing over time than the contradictions of different settings. In Early Work, Peter doesn’t have a great epiphany, and Leslie grows only slightly.
ANDREW MARTIN: I think one of the things I’ve learned from Proust, and from other writers I admire in his tradition, is that character isn’t linear. There’s an assumption, based on the plot arcs of some movies, maybe, and from middle-school English classes, that characters should develop, and that they go from point A to point B to point C, whether that’s toward victory or destruction or revelation. And I think it’s true that in any given narrative there has to be some kind of movement, even if it’s mostly mental. But the narrator of In Search of Lost Time is very different at different points of his life, and he’s at his most blinkered and selfish in the midst of his romantic relationships, from which he seems to learn very little about other people. The only thing that really does have an effect on him is the simple passage of time, but even then, it’s more a matter of the wisdom of survival than anything that specifically happens to him. I don’t know; I love Proust without really understanding him. I should probably read the incomprehensible Beckett book about him again.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: You said the title story is the oldest in Cool for America. What’s the newest?
ANDREW MARTIN: The newest is “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth.” “Attention” is also pretty new. I think both of those are about gaining perspective and looking back at one’s younger self. I always wanted to write about my earlier time in New York, but I think I wasn’t able to write well about that period until recently. The best vantage for writing about a place seems to be the next place. Both of those stories have less of the banter and action present in the earlier stories, which creates room for other things. Instead of just focusing on intense moments, they try to capture a bigger picture of life. In “Childhood,” the structure, the use of time, the ensemble cast is trying to imitate Deborah Eisenberg, who is probably my favorite story writer of all time. She’s able to write a novel in story form, which is something I’d like to be able to do someday.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Is there an Eisenberg story in particular?
ANDREW MARTIN: One of my favorite stories of hers is “Flotsam,” which is the first story in her first collection. It begins with a woman sitting at a dinner table with a friend, looking at a table of younger people before cutting to her early years in New York. I love how she juxtaposes her past self with her present self—but not in an obvious way. Many writers would write that story and annoyingly insist, “This is how this character became who they are” in a very particular, cinematic way. Eisenberg is more generalized than that. The younger people remind her of a whole period of her life; it isn’t as though someone at the other table cuts their finger on a broken glass and suddenly she remembers the time she broke a glass or something. It isn’t one-to-one. Early Work is trying to do that, too. The few times people have talked futilely about making it into a movie or a TV show, they’ve talked about wanting to cut the parts about Leslie’s past. I think it’s because those sections don’t make some specific case about how she became who she is. They’re just episodes from her life that generally illustrate who she is. I find that more interesting than, “Here’s the backstory that explains everything.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: The Leslie sections in Early Work never fall into the trap of feeling like backstory for the Peter story. It feels more like additional texture. Maybe that’s because it eventually overtakes Peter’s story?
ANDREW MARTIN: Well, also, it’s not that relevant to Peter’s story. [laughs] I had a lot more of the Leslie stuff, and it’s what I most regret cutting. But “texture” is the right word. It’s more of an instrument in the band than meant to do “content work.”
WASHINGTON SQUARE: I would imagine you gain a nice freedom in writing the Missoula stories. On the one hand, there is an element of local color and an excuse not to write about New York. On the other, most of the characters are transplants and so aren’t beholden to being some kind of representation of the region.
ANDREW MARTIN: Right, there’s a freedom in not knowing a place inside and out. And being in Missoula allowed me to see my social world in a way I couldn’t before. I could sort of see myself the way other people see me, not just as, like, the “cool, regular guy” that I am in my head. In Missoula, I presented as an East-Coast, publishing-world, Ivy-League person trying to fit in in a pretty remote mountain town. I discovered that while my life might not be interesting on its own, it is interesting in that context. If you can get over myself (which I barely can), you can see the role you have to play.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: “My life might not be interesting on its own”—you said it, not me. Since you said it, though, I think you would agree that, in terms of plot, Andrew Martin is not bringing us “news about the world.” Early Work is about overeducated white people and there’s an adultery plot mixed in. What makes your fiction fun and different is your voice, your psychological felicity, your structure. I wonder if you ever, like me, wish someone would tell you what to write about simply so you could capitalize on those strengths.
ANDREW MARTIN: All the time! I read Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” with my class as part of a course I’m teaching at Boston College. One of the big arguments she makes is that content is a lie, a distraction. Content obscures what art is doing. I don’t know if I’d read “Against Interpretation” when I started writing Early Work, but a dumbed down version of that idea ended up being a revelation for me. At some point, I got out of my own way and decided to write about this world that I knew—graduate students and writers and musicians in college towns—and use every aesthetic trick in my arsenal, without worrying so much about whether readers will be annoyed that it’s about writers and college towns etcetera. I could play to my strengths because the setting and the situation was just the starting point. Still, I beat myself up even now trying to write new things. I’m trying to work on a bigger canvas if I can.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Conceivably, you could play to your strengths for the rest of your career and do fine. What’s important about developing new strengths? Aside from the “quieter” palette you’re establishing with “Childhood, Boyhood, Youth,” what are you eager to learn?
ANDREW MARTIN: Well, I really want to write more explicitly about politics and class and the way those things dictate our lives and behavior. It’s always implicitly there no matter what you write, but it feels more and more important to engage those subjects in ways that haven’t been done before. And as I get older I want to write about some of the difficult things to write about—death and family legacies, and the richness and complications of long-term partnerships. None of which is, at first glance, all that much fun. So maybe I’ll keep writing about drugs and dogs.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: From the very first line of Early Work, Peter is self-consciously trying to control the reader’s impression of him. His voice, if it was turned up two or three degrees, would be almost unbearable in its need to qualify. At its current setting, it’s what readers love about the book. How do you make Peter qualify enough to make his voice alive without qualifying too much and letting the book eat itself?
ANDREW MARTIN: If you look at the book closely, the voice functions differently throughout. It’s not always at that level it starts at, but it comes raring out of the gate with these long, self-conscious sentences that double back on themselves. It pops up at other times, too—usually when he’s stoned, I guess. One of the influences on the beginning was David Foster Wallace, whose work I have an extremely ambivalent relationship with, tending toward dislike, but I admire him as a stylist, because how could you not? I had been listening to an audiobook of Oblivion and I think I’d gotten that rhythm in my head: I-knowwhat-you-may-be-thinking-about-me-but-actually-what-you’re-thinking-aboutme-is, etcetera. Peter at the beginning of Early Work is almost a parody of that, consciously so. But it started driving me crazy pretty quickly, so I stopped doing it. But I thought that mode of narration was still a useful way to introduce him. Nick Carraway doesn’t really keep up the level of self-analysis at the beginning of Gatsby; Ishamel is totally all over the place after the first stretch of Moby Dick. Writing the novel was a lesson in pragmatism and doing whatever I could get away with. With most short stories, every little thing has to work or it’s going to be a failure, whereas with a novel, in order to keep moving, you have to jettison a lot of the perfectionism that’s required that make stories work.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: In “No Cops,” you write, “Cal had very decent, if very male, taste in books (Bolaño, Roth, David Foster Wallace).” What should Cal be reading to spice things up?
ANDREW MARTIN: Oh, gosh, obviously all the good books that his enlightened author loves. He’d probably get a kick out of Joy Williams, for starters. Maybe some Gerald Murnane? Penelope Fitzgerald? Laurie Colwin? Some Sheila Heti would probably help him understand Leslie, at least.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Occasionally, you come through with these incredible triumphs of voice. I’m thinking of something like “Leslie thought for a moment about pissing herself in order to enter the realm of legend, but she worried she was too drunk to plausibly claim it had been fully intentional and not quite drunk enough to make herself that uncomfortable on so many levels.” Do you labor over a sentence like that?
ANDREW MARTIN: I wish I had a good, Gary Lutzian answer,where I could walk you through the construction of a sentence, but I can’t. I write by ear, and I often write in long bursts, and then I go back and revise until it sounds right, or at least interesting, to me. One of the downsides of my “process” is that I can’t seem to reverse engineer it. The tone of a particular story or section of a novel seems to be set by whatever groove I get into, and then the whole revision process becomes about staying true to that particular energy. In the later stages of putting the book together, my agent Molly would say, like, it would be great if you could write a story that showed more of your range. And I’d say, sure, range, coming right up, and I’d try, but I just couldn’t force it.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: Who are your models for developing your voice further?
ANDREW MARTIN: Like a lot of people, I’m totally fascinated by Rachel Cusk’s Outline books. It’s a very deliberate attempt to change one’s voice—to obscure one’s voice—in order to confront new problems in writing. I’m an aesthete and I’ve always been drawn to aesthetes. It might be interesting to see what happens when I don’t think as much about style. And well, I don’t know—Cusk’s amazing, but it also seems like she’s on the verge of floating out into the ether, based on her interviews, and I’m not planning to do that, but . . . do you know the rapper-producer JPEGMAFIA?
WASHINGTON SQUARE: No.
ANDREW MARTIN: He spent all his time promoting his recent album saying, “This is going to be a disappointing one, guys. I just want to prepare you: This is a disappointment.” My new promotional model is just telling everyone that the next novel is going to be the disappointing one.
WASHINGTON SQUARE: But that strategy puts a lot of pressure on the fourth book to be very good.
ANDREW MARTIN: Ha! The ways things are going in the world right now, it seems best not to plan that far ahead.