I spoke to Marten about Pure Life by correspondence throughout the month of May. Everywhere his characters go and everything they do is rendered in Marten’s unforgettable prose style, a voice that I’ve long counted among the strongest in contemporary literature. His protagonists are flawed and susceptible to temptation, like all of us they each carry their own personal shard of darkness that, turned the other way around, always catches the light of what else might have been possible.
This compression allows his novels to travel past their initial premise into new territories of aftershock and aftermath, into the deeper wanting that lies behind what a character tells themselves they’ve set out to achieve. In Pure Life, as in his other books, what for many novelists would be spread over three hundred pages gets compressed into a third of that space, by virtue of a relentless onrush of events, and by Marten’s precision at the level of the sentence and the scene. Marten’s work possesses a kind of assured restlessness that I’ve always admired: his novels do not commit to remaining in only one mode, or to being about only what they seem to be on the first page. His search eventually leads him to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras, where in his desperation he finds yet another kind of violence, different than that of the playing field or the marketplace but with its own public-facing logic. What follows is an increasingly nightmarish descent into Nineteen’s brain-damaged psyche, pushed against the brutality of the world he’s leaving behind, in his lost career and family, and the world he enters into as he looks for a miracle cure for what is likely the same chronic traumatic encephalopathy suffered by so many ex-football players. This is in the jacket copy, more or less, so it’s not a spoiler to say all this happens early in the novel: Nineteen’s playing days-and his fortune-are both over and lost before page fifty. But things go wrong, as the story demands they must. Known to the reader only by his jersey number, Nineteen retires early, injured but seemingly destined to slide into what should be a life of fame and fortune and ease.
Tune in online Tuesday, Jfor Strange Light Presents: Eugene Marten in Conversation with Defector editor David Roth-registration is free.Īt first glance, Eugene Marten’s fifth novel Pure Life (Strange Light) might sound like a departure from the subject material of his previous books, beginning as it does with the archetypal ascent of a small-town high school football player to NFL stardom.
Talking to the author of Pure Life about brand names as verbal death, distrusting omniscience in fiction, and elite semicolon use.