How to Sell by Clancy Martin

The Moment: You root for the bad guys on Law & Order

by Matt Hotz

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Published: Jun 10, 2009

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How to Sell
by Clancy Martin

How to Sell feels familiar.

At its core, Clancy Martin's debut novel is a coming-of-age story. Sixteen-year-old Bobby Clark is expelled from school for stealing a shipment of class rings. He boards a plane bound for Texas and joins his older brother at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange.

It reads like a crime novel, too. Liars, thieves, counterfeiters and con artists use copious quantities of liquor, cocaine, meth and ecstasy while shuttling between wives, girlfriends, mistresses and hookers. Characters from a James Ellroy book would feel comfortable here.

Martin's book is also a tale of the pursuit of the American dream and the eventual, inevitable disillusionment that comes from the pursuit. Comparisons to Updike and Fitzgerald are both inevitable and warranted.

Despite touching so many different schools of American fiction, the vivid prose of How to Sell never wavers. Martin's simple language and realistic dialogue create a page-turner as compulsively readable as William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

The murderer's row of blurbs for How to Sell is just as impressive. Jonathan Franzen, Benjamin Kunkel, Zadie Smith and other literary heavy hitters have taken turns praising Martin's voice, vision and originality, generating massive buzz about the book. In his New York Times review, Tom McCarthy uses as many words evaluating the claims made in the blurbs as he does discussing the book itself.

But these glowing blurbs and their impeccable provenance set expectations too high; potential readers could be disappointed by anything less than Hemingway in his prime. How to Sell is well planned and beautifully executed, and Martin establishes himself as a gifted craftsman: That should be more than enough for a debut novel.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pp., $24, May 12

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