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How to Sell by Clancy Martin

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. A Canadian in 1987 goes to Texas and gets crushingly corrupted in Martin's sexy, funny and devastating debut. Bobby Clark is 16 when he leaves a dead-end setup with his single mother and grass-is-greener girlfriend, Wendy, and heads to Fort Worth to get into the fine jewelry business under the stewardship of his salesman brother, Jim. In no time, Bobby and Jim are snorting lines, Bobby's moving in on (and smoking crank with) Jim's mistress, Lisa, and getting a crash course in amazingly crooked business. Scams, bait-and-switch deals, bogus jewelry and startling treachery are day-to-day at the jewelry store, until the store's gregarious owner gets into trouble at the same time Bobby tries to save Lisa from a massive flame-out. Years later, Bobby's back in Fort Worth, married to Wendy (and with a child) and still in the jewelry business with Jim when Lisa reappears, engaged in an equally questionable if older profession. Bobby's helplessly honest narration is a sublime counterpoint to the crooked doings he's complicit in. Reading this is like watching one man's American dream turn into a soul-sucking nightmare. (May)
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Reviews
“Dirty, greatly original, and very hard to stop reading.”
—Jonathan Franzen

“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 emporium in Texas. It's a festival of drugs, diamonds and sex. Quality is nice, but any drugs, any sex and any diamonds will do, because anything can be spun into something better. 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, ‘I sleep well at night.’ . . . 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.”
—Louisa Thomas, Newsweek

“How to Sell is, with memorably dark comedy, a virtual handbook on fraud. The world the Clark boys build for themselves and teeter precariously upon—one driven by wads of cash, adrenaline, an indiscriminate lust for sex and money, and a misunderstanding of what in life is really at stake—is a compelling setting for Martin’s propulsive storytelling. His narration feels cinematic, the sets and scenery popping off the page. With remarkable skill as the story spools out, Martin omits just enough exposition and interior insights to keep his characters shrouded in mystery, as if constantly reminding us that we’ll always be the customer, never the insider. Speaking of customers, prepare to be a much shrewder one after reading How to Sell.”
—Rachel Rosenblit, Elle

“A timely meditation on greed and the American Dream.”
—Men.style.com

“It’s a lean and mean book, perfect for those who distrust all this recent talk about change. The kind of novel—cool and dark—that goes with you to the beach and then keeps you thinking at night.”
—Benjamin Alsup, Esquire

“Clancy Martin writes with no-nonsense punch, detailing the schemes—fake certificates, ‘antiques’—shady jewelers have been running for centuries. If the sentences in How to Sell feel lived-in, well, that’s because the author himself is a former con man, borrowing liberally from the gem-scam life before going straight (He’s a philosophy professor now; go figure.) By the time you’re hooked on the book’s insidious plot twists, concerning sibling rivalry and a meth-addicted mistress who sleeps better hooking than she does selling Faux-lexes, you’re blissfully unaware you’re downing a metaphor: No commission can buy you a soul.”
—Adam Baer, GQ

“It's hard to imagine a more seductive blurb than that delivered by Jonathan Franzen for Martin's first novel. Here goes: ‘Dirty, greatly original, and very hard to stop reading.’ Sex, of course, may sell, but Martin's wicked take on money, the jewelry business and American passions could prove to have multiple pleasures. Oh, and by the by, Martin teaches philosophy at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and bases his book, at least in part, on an earlier life as a jewelry salesman in Texas.”
—Kansas City Star