Moving Goalposts

Gordon Lish, who has edited the likes of Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo, has called Eugene Marten “one of the top three living male American writers,” while the jacket copy of Marten’s latest novel describes him as “an unheralded, singular master.” At least one of those appraisals is easily proven: five books in, and this author , who was born in Winnipeg but now lives in Cleveland, doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Pure Life is about a washed‑up quarterback with a messed‑up brain, known to readers only as Nineteen (his jersey number). Fresh out of Alcoholics Anonymous, flat broke, and estranged from his family, with his memory full of gaps and his joints full of surgical screws, our hero packs his golf shirts and flies south in search of increasingly unorthodox treatments for “the grey noise in his head.” (The neurodegenerative disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy can...