Martin & Hannah. Nicholas Clemente. DFL Lit, 2022. 267 pages.

 

When a brand-new press comes out with their first book without much publicity, it’s risky for them and for the reader. There is little to no context, not much to go on to judge it out the gate, and also, frankly, little real incentive to take the plunge and go into the world of this new book: it doesn’t take anything away from you to just overlook the work before it ever gets started. You won’t miss it. There’s an ocean of new books coming out all the time from more established outfits. Why should this one be special? Why not instead go with a book from a press that has at least some kind of seasoned apparatus of buzz and established reputation?

 

I’m not a long-time experienced book reviewer, but in moving through the literary culture of Twitterland I am starting to gain a finer-toothed appreciation for what the real authentic shit is, where the rewarding experiences as a reader can come from. There’s hundreds of presses of all shapes and sizes out there, but there’s something exciting about the feeling of “getting in on the ground floor” when an unknown, untested press puts out a first book that really delivers something promising and sets an optimistic tone amidst the cacophony of sharp-elbowed indie lit publishing that values making a lot of noise way ahead of publication day. I had only heard of DFL Lit through their unassuming, unflashy website that posts a selection of fiction, interviews, poetry, and other writing from a small, exclusive corner of the vast metropolis of indie writers in Twitterland, including Stephanie Yue Duhem, Stuart Ross, Rus Khomutoff, and others.. The acronym DFL, I was told, stands for Dead Fucking Last, a nod in the direction of the racing, mythical bike messenger experiences he and his cohort had in the past in some city: could be Chicago, could be New York City where Clemente currently resides, according to his bio. Full disclosure: they published three poems of mine in an early iteration of their website. I had no idea they were doing books until I was asked in a typically humble, quiet way if I would take a look at their maiden voyage, the novel Martin & Hannah by Nicholas Clemente.

 

Within the first ten pages, it becomes clear that this is a book about college life, which for some readers might send up red flags. A well-known anecdote has the novelist David Foster Wallace admonishing his creative writing students at the University of Illinois at Bloomington-Normal to avoid writing campus romances: scenarios where two hapless searchers find each other at the same party and “their eyes met over the keg.” As if to say, “Leave the mawkish fumbling of students alone; they’re not fit for fictional treatment.” Perhaps there’s something too universal or easy about writing such stories.

 

Not so fast, Saint Dave. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the overall college enrollment rate for 18-to-24-year-olds was 40% in 2020, with approximately 19 million students. Surely even those who haven’t been to higher education must concede that within that collective student body there must be some stories worth telling, especially the Bildungsromantic tales of aimless youth emerging from their cocoons to be struck down by the harsh lessons of existence, lessons that are often the tortured result of the students’ own hasty, flawed decision trees. Your mother is not here to clean up after you, students are told, and some snap to attention and some implode.

 

The red flags are, so to speak, false ones, not in the “deceptive psy-op” sense, but in the sense that they should be overlooked by those seeking to read a good book that just happens to be about the lives of college students. Clemente’s polished, well-constructed novel about university life in Chicago skillfully delves into the interiors of men and woman who mostly don’t want to be there:squatters and anarchists living in gutted apartments, looking for love, drugs, and what in the 1960s might have been called “kicks.” Isaac, Topher, Cordelia, Ravi, Julia, and other university students careen from party to party, trekking through masterfully-described frozen city streets. The snow, ice, cold, and night of the outdoor scenes are detailed in ways so fresh that you can feel your fingertips numb and the sweat around your collar turn to uncomfortable chill. Comparisons to the “Whole Sick Crew” of Pynchon’s first novel V., aimless young party-goers on the social circuit, are clear as this mass of characters align, realign, and seek each other in the “periphery of campus where the university made clumsy overtures to the real world and the real world attempted to siphon what profit it could from the university.” Anybody who has ever tried to keep up with the shifting locations of the party—who will be where when, and how to get into their oh so important company against the tide of social avoidance, exclusivity, and studied rejection—will recognize these patterns and their dissatisfactions in Martin & Hannah.

 

In Clemente’s hands, sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll have evolved into blue balls, designer hallucinogenic pharmaceuticals, and “power electronics.” According to the most cursory research Wikipedia has to offer, this genre of noise music is derived from industrial music and involves static, screeching electronics, bass pulses, and shrieking vocals. The titular Martin of the novel (not the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as I originally thought might be the allusion) is Martin Hightower, a university professor who was secretly part of a marginally successful power electronics outfit called Total Mobilization which is being resurrected in this collegiate party scene. Martin is trying to keep this grim musical dalliance a secret from his colleagues at the university because its “ironic far-right” political edge might be misapprehended by the dulled irony detectors of the administration. Martin, who is married with a handicapped child, also has a wandering eye he’d like to keep a secret as he takes an extracurricular interest in a floundering student named Hannah. Again, this is not, as far as my allusion-detecting radar can tell, an analogue to Martin Heidegger’s sometime main squeeze Hannah Arendt, although analogues can be slippery: we don’t know all of Clemente’s intellectual game of references, and if he has one, to our relief, he doesn’t hit us over the head with it as you might expect from a first novel about college.

 

Likewise, perhaps no parallels with Pynchon’s Whole Sick Crew were intended by Clemente, and similarly unverifiable comparisons may not exist between Hannah and the world-historical female cipher V. sought by fascinated men on symbolic quests from Pynchon’s novel. However, in Chicago’s university milieu Hannah is one of those singular, beautiful women who all men, romantic spelunkers strapping on explorer’s gear, think they can find things in even though she in fact contains nothing, a void. She is a source of frustration and a motivator of inescapable jealousy among her fellow students and, crucially, Martin the professor as well as a devious trickster of a TA.

 

This first DFL Lit production wowed me by taking what might have been a pretty pedestrian subject for a novel—young people searching for meaning either in each other or in mind-altering substances, older man wishing to return to youth in a young woman’s arms—and turning it into a propulsive, engaging, satisfying story that pulled me along through an easy reading experience over about four or five days, a perfect length to read a book. This is a novel you like to progress through with a crucial middle section that deepens and differentiates the cast of characters rather than making them a stale merry-go-round of simplistic personalities and tiresome problems you want to get off.

 

For a debut novel, it’s strikingly assured, and moving, too. Isaac, the closest thing to a protagonist in the multi-POV clamor of the book, desires Hannah as much as the rest of the males, and invites her up onto a rooftop in the cold for a quiet place to talk while the white noise and sonic destruction of a noise-art performance occurs downstairs:

 

But the time came to consider his next move. He didn’t know why. He was happy where he was. Or if not happy then close enough; closer than he had been in a long time. But it was a voice that came from outside him, the received wisdom of a thousand generations of men. Guy, Topher, everyone but Cordelia, and maybe her too, would say the same thing. Though Hannah’s back was turned to him, he could feel his cheeks grow hot with the pressure. He didn’t want to break the stillness, but knew already that he would. And in the seconds before he acted took some time to mourn the passing of the moment. His voice was strained and artificial, hitting only wrong notes:

 

“You should get new gloves.”

 

She didn’t respond. He half suspected that she knew what was coming and was doing what she could to delay it. Her fingers were poised on the ledge as if preparing to strike a chord on a piano. Like she was orchestrating the silence, playing it, and at her command it would cease and everything would go back to normal, as loud and fast and meaningless as the tumult downstairs. Her hands went slack and slid back from the edge. Isaac pounced before they disappeared from sight: put his hand on hers and felt it wriggle warmly underneath, pliant, assenting at first. But it drew back in an instant, collapsing like a cat that didn’t want to be held, and then her hands were hidden safely in the pockets of her coat.

 

“Not you too, Isaac,” she said without looking at him…Isaac stayed on the roof for a long time after she left.

 

The novel Martin & Hannah beautifully etches the outlines of urban life among a certain generation of Americans: how people are always looking for each other across cities, always pinpointing addresses and calculating cab fare to the places where something important and momentous is happening,the places you have to get to, in spite of the nasty weather between point A and point B. I enjoyed trudging through the frozen slush with my collar turned up against the blast. There’s always some next place to go, where the company is warm even if the tunes are harsh and atonal and the drama is thick. It’s a cliché to say, at the end of a review of a first book, “I look forward to seeing what Nicholas Clemente and DFL Lit will publish next.” It is my pleasure as a reviewer to prove the cliché to be not a shopworn contraption, but an earnest, personal verity.