Product Details
How to Sell: A Novel

How to Sell: A Novel
By Clancy Martin

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Product Description

Bobby Clark is just sixteen when he drops out of school to follow his big brother, Jim, into the jewelry business. Bobby idolizes Jim and is in awe of Jim’s girlfriend, Lisa, the best saleswoman at the Fort Worth Deluxe Diamond Exchange.
 
What follows is the story of a young man’s education in two of the oldest human passions, love and money. Through a dark, sharp lens, Clancy Martin captures the luxury business in all its exquisite vulgarity and outrageous fraud, finding in the diamond-and-watch trade a metaphor for the American soul at work.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #41947 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-05-12
  • Released on: 2009-05-12
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 304 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

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)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
How to Sell, a teardown of the jewelry industry and a reflection on deception, is "a lesson in double dealing -- in business and in romance," said O. Certainly, the novel contains amoral -- though surprisingly insightful -- characters on uncertain paths to a vaguely defined "success." The New York Times Book Review asked whether, for all its hype, the novel would become "an inevitable classic." The writing, the philosophical inquiries, and the compelling coming-of-age tale, whose scams resonate in this day, are top-notch. "All in all, it's a winning combination," concluded the reviewer -- if not, perhaps, the Great American Novel. But just as The Great Gatsby reflected the corrupted ideals of the Jazz Age, How to Sell may come to represent the early 21st-century American dream -- and how we continue to sell each other and our souls for a tiny, unsatisfying glimpse of it.

Review

“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
 
“A tender yet hardboiled coming-of-age story, a vivid, sometimes philosophical portrait of yearning and greed, of human love and human spoilage—all of it mirrored in stripped-down, addictive prose. Clancy Martin has written a scary, funny blaze of a book.” —Sam Lipsyte
 
“The feeling you get from the moment you open Clancy Martin’s superb novel is one of inevitability. This is the inevitability of truth-telling, of tragedy, of the setup to a good joke, and, very possibly, the inevitability of the classic.” —Benjamin Kunkel

“How to Sell is a bleak, funny, unforgiving novel. It’s a little like Dennis Cooper with a philosophical intelligence, or Raymond Carver without hope. But mostly it’s like itself. It is about how we buy and sell everything—merchandise, drugs, sex, trust, power, peace of mind, religion, friendship, and each other. It’s written extremely finely, with wit and enviable self-control. A genuinely fresh, disconcerting voice.” —Zadie Smith
 
"A funny, quirky takedown of the American dream. A bastard child of John Updike and Mordecai Richler, How to Sell grabs you by the tuchus and doesn’t let go.” —Gary Shteyngart
 

 

Customer Reviews

Its tawdry, discordant, escapist characters and themes are comparable to dostoevsky4
One Amazon reviewer wrote below: "Reading this book is a bit like being cornered at a party by a voluble drunk who drones on about his boring profession, his sex life, and his drug taking. It quickly gets tiresome and you look for an escape." Interestingly enough, Clancy Martin is exactly that: a locquacious drunk. To note, he's also considered one of the leading existentialist philsopher's in the nation. I know both these facts because I'm one of his students. Having been introduced to these facts, I think, is essential for undertaking this novel. Don't dismiss the novel as some ex-jewelry salesman's lark at retrospection.

How to sell or ... does God exist?4
HOW TO SELL is a novel by Clancy Martin. It is his first one, which is my favorite read. Generally, first novels are first person narratives about a subject the author is familiar with. Write what you know is a truism. "How to Sell" is about the fine jewelry business. Great, I thought, I'd learn something I know nothing about. That is why I like first novels--they inform me about parts of the world I haven't experienced. The fashion world, the art world, politics, Africa, the movie business, the CIA, and on and on. Martin did, according to the jacket, "... worked for many years in the fine jewelry business." And, he was a philosophy professor. VERY interesting, I thought. I was not disappointed. I was puzzled.

How to sell? Lie, steal, and cheat. Be very good at it, and have no conscience about it. There it is in a nut's shell. Oh, and it helps to stay stoned on cocaine and speed and drink like a fish and f__k like a rabbit. This can't be true, can it? This was a tale about two brothers, a father, and two very loose women who were more interested in screwing than money, jewels, or children. It wasn't particularly well written--the dialogue was confusing and everyone seemed to speak with the same voice. In addition, it was hard to tell the order of events; I often had to reread paragraphs and couldn't always tell what was happening, to what were the narrator's inner thoughts. Was that on purpose, to show just how screwed up this person was? Or ... is the author that crazy? I decided to check him out and googled him. Up popped a two-hour debate he had with a pastor of a Christian church titled "Does God Exist?"

This is what I think. The novel was a vehicle for the professor to profess about what amorality looks like. The jewelry business cannot be THAT sleazy! The whole novel just made me want to shower and never, ever, set foot in a jewelry store. AND ...: Give up sex, stop drinking, and never, ever do any drug again, legal or not. It was also a way to mock churches and those who preach they KNOW (the father is an insane preacher/clairvoyant/psychic) what is the Truth of things. As it turns out, Martin's father was a man of God who did have a church and his debater opponent, the pastor, says he believes ALL atheists have father issues, and subsequently, problems with authority and thus God. [My, my.] Professor Martin declared, "I am not an atheist." The pastor asserted, "Without God, there cannot be any reason for moral behavior." [Yikes.] Martin came back, "NO, the absence of belief makes possible, and more likely, true moral behavior and allows for humanity to thrive." [I cheered.]

The debate took place two years ago. Martin might well have written the novel as part of ... process therapy. It is not easy to take on God and the justified, pretentious, conforming, traditional, know-it-all. Maybe he overreacted a little. I gave it four stars. It is different. It is entertaining. And in some paradoxical way (philosophy professors love paradox) it is a moral story about how not to live.

Wish it told me more about the inside story3
What I loved about How to Sell was its inside-baseball view of the jewelry industry - I learned enough scams and schemes to scare me from ever entering a jeweler shop again. Unfortunately, it was wrapped around a fairly conventional story that, ultimately, didn't take the reader particularly far or anywhere particularly unpredictable. But boy, what stories about the industry...