Andrew Martin writes so beautifully and captures the weird little moments of life and interpersonal dynamics so well. However, one of the three characters didn't feel real, felt more like a cardboard cutout. Also, I felt his gorgeous writing was wasted on the slightness of the book.

I am looking forward to seeing what Martin will do in the future. He could give us something really great potentially.

The banter in this book, which is basically all dialogue (and #whitepeopleproblems), is next level. A very enjoyable read, nonetheless.

"Did you ever have the problem where you don't want to go where you're supposed to be, but you can't go where you want to be?" This is the problem the self-absorbed protagonist of this book has throughout. Mildly amusing.

A very well-written, and very sad book. It did a great job showing all the smaller, different emotions contained in the larger one of love, and how it looks to lose love and gain a new iteration of it at the same time. Andrew Martin did a great job of creating the characters in this book; almost all the ones we spend our time with are neither all good or all bad, like everyone is. Some of the prose feels a little too dramatic to the point where I can't really tell if it's the narrator talking or if it's the author, but the story is still compelling in its movement and trajectory. Despite any negative aspects, I found that there's a lot to reflect on both throughout the book and at its end; I give it 4 Goldblums out of a possible 5 Goldblums.

I could easily given this book two stars or five stars, but three seemed the most wrong of all options. Nothing positive or negative I say about the characters seems totally accurate, which I suppose is the point. But what I can say is there were some exquisitely perfect sentences and the first section is particularly full of them. For example:

-“She radiated the kind of positivity that suggested barely repressed rage.”

-“She really was an excellent host, however many people her family had enslaved and murdered.”

3.5 Stars ---
The themes of this book bear no real import in a way that is almost comforting right now. There is little urgency & the prose appeases my upper-middle class, liberal arts sensibilities despite the incessant name dropping by a would-be writer. I am disinterested in whatever moral stakes Martin is imparting --a kind of lulling, meditative bludgeoning at how blasé, adrift and inconsequential Pete's angst is. He can barely sustain anguish. As a reader, I was glad to have briefly entered into the scene and I am glad to leave.

Nearly everyone in this book is a toxic monster, but I didn’t hate the execution nearly as much as I thought I would, or nearly as much as I hate the subject matter. May Andrew Martin interact with a single person who isn’t a writer.

Pretty good. Despite most of the characters being extremely unlikable, I felt like they were actually quite accurate portrayals of privileged people in their twenties and their disfunctional relationships with their partners and also with friends. "Geniunely shallow" was a phrase I saw on another review, agree with that.