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BEING SOLD CLANCY MARTIN

The gleaming metallic book jacket for “How to Sell”, Clancy Martin’s debut novel, boasts many things. First, it indicates that Martin spent years in the fine jewellery business, lending credence to the dirt he dishes on the industry. Second, it promises a story that is “greatly original”, even a “quirky takedown of the American dream”, with blurbs from nearly every young darling of the literary publishing world (Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Benjamin Kunkel, etc).
 
Like any fine sell, this one is a bit deceptive. “How to Sell” is hardly “The Great Gatsby”. Quite simply, it lacks heft. But it is a lively coming-of-age story with some grim insight into the jewellery trade. It is also a timely take-down of the chicanery that comes with greed.
 
Bobby Clark, a high-school dropout, travels from Calgary to Texas to join his brother Jim in the high-stakes hucksterism of luxury sales. “You are in a real country now,” crows the silver-tongued Jim, who scoops Bobby up from the airport in a white Cadillac limousine. “Here, take a bump. This way,” he suggests, introducing Bobby to cocaine between boasts about money. Also in the limo is a captivating woman named Lisa, his married brother’s girlfriend. Bobby’s head spins.
 
This is a not-quite sentimental education, divided into two parts. The first takes place at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange, where Bobby discovers his knack for selling. He understands what customers need to hear: old ones want to feel young; young ones want to feel grown-up; new couples are buying belief in themselves; and an expensive chandelier will put people in the mood. (Some single-malt scotch and a few brazen lies help move things along.) The second part takes place years later, when the Clark brothers decide to run a jewellery business together.
 
Like Brett Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney, Mr Martin has chronicled a seamy, dissolute way of life through the eyes of a culpable yet somewhat self-aware hero. Bobby is both naïve and unnerving, criminal and sensitive. Yet “How to Sell” never quite becomes what it could have been. As a Nietzsche scholar and translator, Martin might have injected more insight about deception—the lies we tell each other because of the lies we tell ourselves. Instead, he has written the equivalent of a cheap diamond: it may glimmer, but don’t look too closely. 

~ EMILY BOBROW

"How to Sell", by Clancy Martin, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, out now.