Nasty little book featuring utterly repellent characters. Engagingly written, I guess, but the moral vacuity of the book is a bit wearying. Also didn't appreciate the author name-dropping a lot of titles to lend a veneer of literacy - nice try, chump.

I don’t usually like it when young writers write about young writers but Martin’s writing is so funny and observant that he could write about anything and I’d be delighted. I’m not supposed to be reading for pleasure at the moment and yet I found myself picking this up at every opportunity. Loved it.

the dialogue was easeful at some points but mostly it made me never want to date a writer going through an early 30s crisis.

Couldn’t finish. This read like if Brian griffin from family guy wrote auto fiction. Maybe it gets better.

A novel about a self absorbed aspiring writer may not sound that interesting, but the dialogue is consistently intriguing and the literary references are a nice touch for us bibliophiles out there. The casual treatment of sex is refreshing- too many people take sex too seriously- but it also becomes a little tiresome after 240 pages of screwing. In an age of hypocritical moral high ground standing, this novel probably won’t be popular with a large chunk of the population (sexist, objectifying trash!) but it’s carefree attitude is a pleasant break from our current real world dynamics.

The characters themselves are complicated and their relationships with each other are...quite something. This is more than just a fun, quick read- although it is that as well. Somewhere between 3 and 4 Stars, but I’m going to settle with a conservative 3. Pretty good book from a promising writer.

Martin apparently has a short story collection set to be published soon- a format that would suit his talents well. I look forward to reading it.

Terrifying in its accuracy, delicious in its schadenfreude.

You know this dude. He's clever, well-educated, and well-read. He's got great music suggestions (Roy Orbinson's "Crying"). But deep down we all know he's the worst kind of asshole. Fuck that dude.

This is exactly the type of novel that will get under most readers' skin (look at the top rated reviews here); it is conceited, smug, and unabashedly masculine in the Updike/Roth sort of vein. It's about an upper class (at least in lifestyle and education if not in actual wealth) dude willing to blow up his life and hurt the women in it just because he can't deal with things responsibly. I'm choosing to read this as my own chosen diet of guilty pleasure. I loved it! I love the writing, how smarmy and caustic and funny it is. I don't want this review to be taken as some sort of "the canon/masculinity is under fire" type thing, because I don't believe that; I do think that our shifting expectations of literature warrant a discussion, though. This is the exact type of novel that would have gotten heaps of praise in the 60s or 70s, and even if it is self-conscious of what type of bourgeois thing it is aping, it still is the thing that I wouldn't necessarily want to proclaim from the rooftops as one of my favorite books of 2018.