LUCK press

"A wonderful first novel, one rich in characters, places, events and feelings...a marvelously wrought story out of the American heartland, one told with originality, a marvelous style and a generous spirit." --Boston Herald 8.6.00

"Eric Martin does an expert job of leading his readers through the complicated physical and political geography of the North Carolina tobacco industry. From the red clay earth in which the tobacco plants take root, to the bars where owners gather and the crowded trailers wherre their immigrant workers dwell, Martin establishes the particulars of his story--and the gentle threads that bind it together--so quickly and simply that readers will believe they are in the hands of a natural story teller." --San Francisco Chronicle 9.24.00

"Tense and provocative....Martin deftly chronicles the plight of the Mexican migrants and illuminates the barriers that thwart understanding between Southern landowners and workers." --Publishers Weekly 6.26.00

"A readable, earnest first novel...Martin explores the dark reality of one successful tobacco farming community in North Carolina." --Atlanta Journal Constitution 10.1.00

"Humid and turbulent first novel...There's evidence aplenty of a Faulknerian curse-destiny here....But Martin's purview, as suggested by the title, seems more existentialist, less aligned with Faulkner than with, say Robert Penn Warren....The South's old and new troubles, Martin's affecting debut seems to say, were built upon the accidents of circumstance, of bad luck meeting bad luck on darkened dirt roads." --Salon 8.23.00

“An impressive story of love and of the struggle for social justice.” — J. M. Coetzee

“I've read Eric Martin's LUCK twice--once like a blue streak, borne along by the riveting riveting story and clear swift prose, and second time for the fine craft and rich human understanding. He's a writer I’ll follow with great expectations.” — Reynolds Price

“Eric Martin is one of those writers who can be read for the pleasure of his style, which is lyrical and rhythmic and here and there as much like music as prose. His characters have the breath of life. He is a natural-born storyteller. His description of the flat and dusty North Carolina farm country are so immediate and apt that they can make a reader feel as if the page had dissolved, and the land lay in front of his own eyes.” — Alec Wilkinson

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TRYING HIS LUCK
Portland Press Herald
Published on October 1, 2000

When Eric Martin was a student at Duke University in the late 1980s, his writing professor told him he wasn't particularly interested in anything Martin had written--but that, with a lot of hard work and a little luck, he didn't see why Martin couldn't be a writer someday.

What Martin's professor didn't know--and Martin never revealed--was that the writing student had already banged out an amazingly compelling scene on a borrowed word processor one steamy night that summer. One of those spontaneous acts of creativity that come unannounced and can't be ignored, it happened during Martin's summer internship in social work among migrant Hispanic workers on a tobacco farm in North Carolina. Martin thought the fruits of his labor were pretty good that night. He tucked the three or four pages away in duffle bag.

Nine years later, those pages, virtually unchanged, are the opening scene of LUCK, a first novel about a crusading college student and son of a wealthy North Carolina tobacco farmer who comes home to improve the living and working conditions for Hispanic migrant workers but stirs up old rivalries and animosities that lead to tragedy instead.

LUCK, published in July (W.W. Norton, $23.95) is getting good reviews from book critics. They are calling the action "explosive," the writing "lyrical and terse," and the characters "flesh and blood, complex people."

"It's not just the young savior coming to save a town," says Ethan Remmel, a friend of Martin's who read a draft of LUCK before it was published. "It's a much more nuanced and textured view. It's a surprising story from such a young writer."

Martin, who grew up in Portland, turns 31 this month. But while he continued to work at his writing, he also took to heart his writing professor's observation and did a lot of traveling after college to gain the experiences that would give him something to say. Besides the summer internship in rural North Carolina, Martin spent time in Mexico, Ecuador and in graduate school at the University of Texas. he met and stayed with people much like the Hispanic family that becomes an integral part of LUCK, filling notebooks full of the details, dialogue and experiences that would become a part of his story.

Martin says he came to realize the huge mythological attraction the United States holds for people south of the border, and he experienced the same facination with people so different from himself that the main character of LUCK does--though he never fell in love with a Hispanic girl the way the book's main character did.

Martin lives in San Francisoc now with his longtime girlfriend, a high school social studies teacher. He says growing up in Maine was a huge factor in his development as a writer. With it's long, cold winters, Maine was an ideal setting for an avid reader who devoured every book he could, be it high-brow fiction, sci-fi or trashy romance.

"My mom would let me read anything I wanted," he says. "Her attitude was anything I was reading was better than watching TV." His mother, Joyce Martin, is a professor of children's literature at the University of Southern Maine."

Books about the South and people of different backgrounds were of particular interest because they were so unlike Martin's life. Early on, he says, he became facinated with different ways of viewing the world. He remembers one incident in which he and his friends, who went to the private Waynflete School, were chasing the public school kids arouund his neighborhood on Fessenden Street.

"They ran right into our house, out to the barn, where we totally thought we had them cornered," Martin recalls. "But then they launched themselves right out of the (second story) loft. We were in awe. We had never thought to do that."

Martin might view his growing-up years as limited in experiences to draw from in his writing, but they did help him get published. One of Martin's old teachers at Waynflete, John Sterling, went on to become editor-in-chief of a pubishing house in New York. After Martin gave up trying to write an autobiographical novel about a writer, and finally finished a draft of "Luck," he screwed up the courage to visit his old teacher.

Sterling liked the book but didn't offer to publish LUCK, because he didn't think it would sell more than 20,000 copies. Instead, he steered Martin in the direction of an agent who quickly found a home for it at W.W. Norton. Martin got a modest advance, enough that he can work part-time now as he writes his next book.

"I knew I had one shot with John. He was a powerful guy, and he wasn't going to read something written by a kid he used to know at 13 too many times," Martin says. "I was really lucky."

Another of Martin's teachers at Waynflete, Elizabeth Cooke, would disagree that luck had much to do with it. A published novelist herself, she says she knew when Martin was 15 that he would be a writer.

"It had to do with the way he used words, both playfully and with a seriousness of purpose and the way his writer's voice, even at 15, had an authority unusual for that age.," she says. "It also had to do with Eric's intellectual acuity. He looked at things and took them in, wondered about things, worked to understand what the world was."

Ironically, the differences in the ways people view the collision of events and people in their lives is one of the central themes of Martin's novel. By the end of LUCK, which ends where it began in that amazingly powerful scene he wrote nine years ago, Martin says everyone has a different idea what luck is.

"The old adage is, you make your own luck," he says. "But no matter how much they seem in control of it, they realize they are dealing with forces a lot bigger than they are."

Ultimately, Martin says, LUCK is more about character and the decisions you make, based on the things that happen to you.

"It's a lot of people doing their best and then giving it over to fate," he says.

Martin's next book shares some of the same themes as LUCK, though the two worlds that collide are on the West Coast instead of in rural North Carolina. In this book, conflict develops between the e-people, the young affluent whites who work for the many dot-coms in the city, and the blacks living in the city's housing projects on the other side of one of San Francisco's many steep hills. Again, Martin's experience living in San Francisco, plaing pick-up basketball on the city's playgrounds the past few years have given him the details and the sensibilities to explore this subject.

"That's the big thing I've learned," says Martin, who played basketball at Waynflete and pick-up ball at the Reiche School when he was growing up in Portland. "Write what you know--but know as much as you can."