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Douglas A. Martin (born in VA, raised in GA; NY 1997)
Village Voice: "Poet and novelist Martin is the literary equivalent of Morrissey--only he's not afraid to tell you what he wants. OUTLINE OF MY LOVER begins like a redacted PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST, filtered through the confusion of emerging sexual identity and a prettily gray demeanor."
BRANWELL: "With Hemingway-sized spatters of histrionic prose, author Douglas Martin vividly paints the mad landscape of childhood imagination." (baltimore city paper)
"A tender, tragic portrayal of a doomed artist... This volume's beautiful declarative sentences are perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family; they bring Branwell Bronte's world to light." (publishers weekly)
"Stylistically complex and emotionally evocative....Branwell Bronte emerges as a fascinating lost character, both muse and devil to his sisters' passions, giving us a new dimension to this ever fascinating family." (darcey steinke)
"BRANWELL is an opium dream, akin to the quasi-documentary recits of Herve Guibert--lyrical, hypnotic, genre-bending. Martin's novel functions as a fictional essay on the troubled, alluring legend of Branwell Bronte, as well as a truly poetic experiment in how to push autobiographical fantasy to its limits. I enjoyed it immensely." (wayne koestenbaum)
YOUR BODY FIGURED: "How on earth could Douglas A. Martin follow up the amazing fever dream that was his Branwell? How could he take us even deeper into the heart and flesh of longing and the loneliness of want? I don't know. I only know he has again - this time focusing his laser lens on what it is to be a muse or want a muse, how often someone kills the thing they love. Riffing on and dreaming into the lives of Hart Crane, Francis Bacon, Balthus and others, Martin gives hypnotic voice to a nameless you, a kind of male spirit that both inspires and is destroyed by those who call on, use and need him." (rebecca brown)
"Rilke, Balthus, Hart Crane, Francis Bacon: Of their lives and work, and of a lyric examination of the ruthless force of art and the erotic, Douglas A. Martin has conjured a mesmerizing and disturbing text, a gorgeous poem-as-novel set in he wake of the explosive ecstasies of twentieth century art. I have read nothing else like it." (honor moore)
"How sentences that look so unassuming could still agitate and exhilarate and break my fucking heart, I do not know. What I've learned from Douglas A. Martin is that the sentence is an essay." (john d'agata)
OUTLINE OF MY LOVER: "Douglas Martin has a beautiful voice. It is a thing of grace." (dennis cooper)
"There is a reverence in Douglas Martin's writing composed of equal parts language and love. OUTLINE OF MY LOVER strips away the dross, leaving you with the pure mood of youth." (dale peck)
"Douglas Martin takes you through the heat of family, the electricity of want, and the watch-what-you-wish-for gift of an elusive, famous, lover. This novel feeds you." (michelle tea)
"This book is full of hard-won, fraught, unsparing emotional truth. It is a love story between a raw and damaged boy-narrator and a famously mysterious rock star. But more than that, it is a piece of stylist and ferociously sharp prose. I love its fierce concentration and levels of obsession." (colm toibin; international book of the year pick for the times literary supplement)
IN THE TIME OF ASSIGNMENTS: "Douglas A. Martin is best know as a writer of luminous, brooding prose, but IN THE TIME OF ASSIGNMENTS shows him to also be a poet. The poems in this book tell about memory, loss, life's complicated hurts and longings. And they show a wonderful trust in beauty to get us through all that." (juliana spahr)
"I have always enjoyed Martin's writing. He lets you in--brings you along and deep into his longing and makes both him and you, the reader, a little less lonely in the process." (mike albo)
American Book Review, KEVIN KILLIAN: In the title story a gay “escort” flashes snapshots from his working life in contemporary Manhattan, each date a fragile shuffle of paragraphs. Hotel rooms, nude massage, fake names. All action timed in increments, $75 per every thirty minutes. Really whatever turns these guys on. He, our hero, is pretending he’s twenty years old. Even that basic lie, the lie of youth, that’s got to tell on a guy after awhile. His roommates are starting to wonder how he’s coming up with his share of the rent. “They”—the tricks—change the subject—the narrator—in a tidy economy of money versus desire. He becomes what they want him to be, boarding school boy, athlete, thug. Where’s the real me? It disappears. Echoes of the old phrase, “they change the subject” hover over every transaction: i.e., mutual misunderstanding, as in, “Ask liberals where the money’s supposed to come from—and they change the subject.” So there’s a contempt built in, or referred to, dragged in really: human feeling invades the carefully articulated surfaces of folded hand towels, no underwear. In one trick’s home there’s a child’s drawing on the door of the bedroom they make love in. Everyone’s got a secret, and the cash makes it all go down smooth. The prose tries to evade attention, pretending to be serviceable only. It takes $150 worth of attention to see it’s really a sort of poetry masquerading as something younger, more commercial.
Martin made my ears prick up a few years back with his debut novel. Outline of my Lover, its title and indeed its shape that of a long-lost Marguerite Duras screenplay, was published by Soft Skull in spring 2000. It was a text so murky you couldn’t see through it. Put your finger up to the sentences, and they would dissolve under your touch. I admire a writer with the courage of his convictions, even if he’s doing something dumb, and whatever it was, precious perhaps, Outline of my Lover wasn’t dumb. Curiosity seekers and fans of the National Enquirer dove into this book in droves, for it was publicized as a roman à clef about Martin’s real life love affair with a closeted pop star. I wonder what those shallow curiosity seekers made out of it. —What am I talking about, I was one of them! Who doesn’t want to read about the rich and the famous, or more precisely, about the closeted? Everything else is just gravy, and sometimes the gravy’s got lumps in it. “Outline” is today a word with one foot in MFA workshop seminar tables, and the other in CSI forensics, where yellow tape shows you where the body once crumpled itself up. And Martin’s writing is most successful as it locates itself within the body.
They Change the Subject divides into three sections. The first opens up with “License,” a delicately observed tale of young love, as two Southern boys, loath to admit a mutual attraction, let themselves be picked up by a shadowy motorist who, absolutely without politesse, acts quickly on the responses his charges engender in each other. The boy who doesn’t get off emerges as our narrator, glancing into the rear view mirror into the steamy back seat. He’s always the last one to be loved, the first to be forgotten. He doesn’t even earn a name, though he will later adopt trick names, like “Bobby” or “Woody.” It’s a brilliant characterization, and our sympathies are with him throughout his youth, especially in the longish tale, “A Model Love.” In it our boy answers an ad for models placed by a straight painter on whom, as the weeks pass in a rustic studio, he develops a crazy crush made all the more vulnerable by his ongoing nudity. Is abjection a prerequisite for art? If not, how else can we bring it into the world without hurting our selves? Another early story ends with a frisson of broken boundaries: “I hold the heart hole-punch in one of my hands, waiting for the next customer. I place the heart hole-punch around my lower lip, just fit it there. and am surprised that I can get it around.” Well, of course he winds up with a heart-shaped dent in his mouth—“just enough to break the skin.” (48)
Part Two is called “Out Takes,” and yes, it seems like pretty much, they’re out-takes from the novel about the pop star. In part three our hero goes right off the deep end, having lost the big love of his life, and he walks through the gauntlet of escort service, where every humiliation stings all the more because once, he had a love worth whispering about. Every erection brings its own Gethsamene. In different ways Martin’s fiction repeatedly poses the same question, what’s in and what’s out? In response, Martin has theorized out of the K-hole of identity, in the essay he wrote for the recent anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. “I’m interested in how the daily periodically builds to this breaking point, what one needs to be interested in going on to continue, how much lack one can take in one life, before one begins looking for the means to supplement that existence.” They Change the Subject does have its existential moments. I can’t go on. I’ll go on. It isn’t “I” anyway.
“I want to keep watch out,” Martin’s essay continues, “for the other I may be. I am aware of adopting a somewhat confessional tone. I will want a text that approaches responsibly its subject matter, never as the certain, never as the given. I want myself to be implicated in my texts and to have to answer for them, in some accountability, to give a reality I feel denied.” [Douglas A. Martin, “The Day Outlying,” Burger, Gluck, Roy, Scott, eds. Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2004, pg. 87.)
The collection of modes that Martin has thought up for his young hero isn’t quite varied enough to form a complete arc, but you get the feeling he’s not looking for one. He restates in Signac colors his material’s formal connections, reiterates his hero’s loneliness and courage, and finds ways to make a worn out theme new again, or makes the worn-out-ness new by placing new constraints on the old story of Camille, the whore suffering from too much feeling. I never liked that word, “precious,” because what after all becomes of the precious once you’ve demoted that word to denote everything you don’t like? At least in 2006, with The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy still ringing in our ears, no one can really say that word, “precious,” without hearing the voice of Gollum, obsessed, nasty, insane, coming back at us as if to say, precious isn’t about being over-perfect or something, it’s about things we just don’t know how to handle with our limited little pleasure cells.