Talking to Martin about deception can be unnerving. His voice, sweetened with sincerity, has the compulsive tones of a convert. Sincere people make good salesmen. So what to make of Clancy Marlin—a man who wants to sell his debut novel while reclaiming his soul?
When he was young, selling was simple—a matter of getting a customer to buy into his fictions. “He was a very gifted liar. ” says his brother and former business partner, Darren. Thai much is still true, as Martin’ s novel, How to Sell, makes clear. How to Sell is outrageous, theatrical and slicker than oil. It tells the tale of Bobby Clark, a high-school dropout who joins his older brother at a jewelry shop in Texas. It’ s a festival of drugs, diamonds and sex. Prostitution, a saleswoman turned hooker suggests at one point, is a more honest kind of living than the jewelry trade (at least in this book) . “With what I do now, ” she tells Bobby, “1 sleeps well at night. ”
Martin was born in Toronto, in 1967. Like his protagonist, he left high school, moved to Texas and got a job at the jewelry store where his brother worked. “I would say that, unfortunately, most of the book is lifted directly from my life with some exaggeration and lots of omission, ” says Martin cheerfully. For a young man, the life had a kind of reckless glamour. “You sell a diamond, and booing, ” he says. But Martin was a little different from most employees. He read, for example. Just as Bobby rims on a Jorge Luis Borges story to sell a bracelet, Martin wove stories for customers from the plotlines of books, and he’ d read Spinoza’ s Ethics between boos and bumps of coke. Bobby’ s pain, too, conics from Martin’ s life: his complicated relationships with his older brother and his charming but crazy father, Bill, who was never quite far enough out of the picture. “I think a lot of Clancy’ s interest in self-deception came from his interest in who his dad was” says his ex-wife, Alicia Martin.
Martin tried to steer his life in another direction. He went to college, began graduate school in philosophy and married. Then, one day, when he was in Copenhagen working on a paper on Kierkegaard, his brother called and asked him to help with the business plan lord expanding his jewelry store. Suddenly, Martin was out of school and back in jewels. Unlike the shop started by the brothers in the novel, the Martins’ joint venture was clean. Darren insists. But the game, more or less, was the same: the process of turning a gem from a mass of matter into a narrative of possibility.
In the seven years Martin worked there, life was never boring, but it wasn’ t much of a life. “I had all this experience, and no sense of moral responsibility. ” Martin says. His marriage broke up. He despaired. But he began writing, and that seemed to offer the promise of something worthwhile. He returned to graduate school. He wanted to understand deception and self-deception not practice it. Insofar as he could.
Martin remarried and became a professor. In addition to writing fiction, he translated Nietzsche and had edited several collections on ethics (including the forthcoming Philosophy of Deception) , his nonfiction book Love, Lies and Marriage comes out next year. When we spoke two months ago, he said his life was now “incredibly calm and domestic” . He did not say that he was undergoing one of the most trying periods of his life.
With How to Sell, Martin has written a gem of a story. Selling it probably won’ t be hard. The bigger challenge for Martin might be to learn how to stop selling.