BmoreArt

The Hampden neighborhood is well known in Baltimore for its white, migrant working-class roots, primarily from Appalachia, who came to work the nearby mills that once thrived along Jones Falls and were known for their clannish nature. When I moved to Baltimore in the late 1990s, it still had a reputation for segregation and was full of rough-tumble, wiseacre street kids from families you didn’t want to mess with. 36th Street, known as The Avenue by locals, is Hampden’s main street, with all that implies.

In 2004 (when the story takes place), the neighborhood was undergoing rapid change. White-on-white gentrification was underway; property values had skyrocketed, attracting investors. Many nearby warehouses were converted into studio spaces, and more artists began to move in. The Avenue became home to a variety of new restaurants, antique stores, and other boutique businesses, which flourished, pulling clientele in from all over the city, including numerous tourists. The 1998 film Pecker, by John Waters, famously uses the Hampden neighborhood and some of the same issues as the subject of one of his best and most sincere films.

The gentrification of Hampden continues to this day and is now even more displacing, but Marten’s book is less about the outside politics of these changes and more about the main character Mattie’s internal life with her family and work friends in that milieu, focusing on the exploration of the social through the personal. It is an intimate portrait written with spark and delight, even as the characters grapple with the drudgery of the mundane.

Each chapter is focused on a particular place and tale, weaving through relatable stories of motherhood, love, and lust amid day-to-day life. We follow Mattie through one job at a grocery store salad bar (with a group of coworkers described in delightful detail) to another at a rollicking antique store right on The Avenue where we get to glimpse the wheeling and dealing  lives of pickers who resale at a profit through a bevy of tricks while dealing with a fickle public, some alcoholism, and a sex drought.

A main plotline involves Mattie falling slow and sweet for a trickster local record store owner, who has just opened shop and whose charismatic charm turns lubricious even though he is married.

Particularly compelling though, is Mattie’s frazzled parenting of a sparky thirteen-year-old daughter who bursts with riveting determination, pushing back against her former punkster mom. To make things more complicated, Mattie has taken in another, more feral girl at her daughter’s request—an in-need “tomboy” (the confused wrong language of the era left intact for important reasons the author explains in an insightful afterword). The girls’ relationship is more intertwined than initially thought, evident in their chaotic, youthful blossoming lives that include some obvious neck blemishes.

Martens is a focused storyteller who delivers a strong narrative. The book is achingly heartfelt yet a whole lot of fun, a heady read by a writer who knows her craft and lets it fly. The book can be read quickly in one sitting yet the heart of the tale lingers enough to make you want to reread it.

Many of the characters and locations in the book can be recognized if you lived in that area during this time period (as I did). Still, Martens says that events have been significantly altered from her experience; people have been reimagined. At the reading, this sparks a lively discussion about what this kind of fiction is exactly. Auto-fiction, a relatively new term, was introduced by some in the audience, but the author rejects it as too limiting. She prefers the traditional term—just “fiction,” she says.

She argues for an “art as art” approach to her work, allowing it to stand on its own, and hopes for a critical response to it that understands her approach. She is right. The major writers of the late twentieth century that I admired growing up mined their lives in precisely this way, and critics often deciphered it with knowing revelations as well. 

Since the story is based twenty years ago, Mattie feels fictional to Martens despite the resemblances. She often finds her thirty-eight-year-old younger self perplexing. That said, she omitted anything she thought might be hurtful to others or seriously wrong, and throughout the process, she remained, above all, committed to her daughter, whom she had first sought and received permission to write about again.

At the end of the night, when a line forms to get books signed, Martens reveals that a second book is in progress, a kind of sequel. The Avenue clamors for a follow-up, maybe more than one. She participated in the recent Baltimore Book Fair in Waverly and her book did well after people realized its story was connected to Hampden. 

Baltimore takes pride in its own and in the writers who tell its stories. There’s a whole list of them—big names like Anne Tyler, Laura Lippman, Adrienne Rich, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Madison Smartt Bell, and many, many others, of course. But even more numerous and possibly more important are the many local writers who highlight the diverse stories of this region. You can find them through local publishers, excellent organizations like CityLit and The Pratt Library, numerous academic programs, bookstores (like the gem in Hampden—Atomic Books), and at all the readings around town. China Martens has long been part of this community, and with the publication of The Avenue, a new chapter in her already impressive creative career has begun.

As I leave the reading, The Avenue is lively on the cool fall night. Next door, a huge craft beer place with wide open front windows blasts pop music as it fills with noisy clusters of customers. A variety of contemporary eateries, many now offering vegan options, line the street. The latest record store (not the one in the book, but similar) and skate board shop attract a younger crowd. But the 7/11 across the street feels same as it ever did: generations of Hampden residents struggling and thriving, all living through variations of Martens’ universal true life tales—parents confused, bored workers looking for connection and meaning, some street folks struggling—everyone tumbling through some version of lust amid crazy love. In this way, The Avenue, as Martens has noted, is just like every Main Street around.

Pick up or order your copy of The Avenue from your favorite local bookstores, (in particular Atomic Books) or buy it through China Martens’ website.