A millennial novel with many name-checks and much consumption

It seems I've been reading a stream of novels about and by millennials, the latest being Andrew Martin's neatly titled Early Work. Oddly enough, it seems like a neat counterpart to the novel I read previously, Sally Rooney's Conversations with Friends, both about a artistic/writerly 4some (two couples) and the complicated relationships that develop among them, each narrated by one of the foursome in a sharp and trenchant manner, each involving lots of drinking and smoking (cigarettes included - I ask again whether this stupid vice is particular to the millennial gen or is it an authorial - and cinematic - device: Got to give characters something to do in between all that dialog), with major difference that one is from a female POV the other from a male (with all that this implies and entails) and that one is set in the US (Virginia) the other in Dublin - though I found nothing especially Irish about Rooney's novel. In Early Work, the narrator is a fledgling novelist (I guess we'd have to assume, mutatis mutandis, that despite his writing frustrations as a character we are reading the fruits of his labor) teaching part-time in a prison program, his long-time girlfriend/partner is a med student working on the side on an epic poem; at the outset he meets a really beautiful woman, visiting from Texas, published a few stories (putting her ahead of the game) and supposedly working on a screenplay. The 4th member of the set - her fiance, the only one not a writer, is back in Texas but will soon visit. Not a hell of a lot happens in the first quarter of the novel, although we do get sharp character delineation and we can see the dangerous flirtation emerging between narrator and Texas woman (Leslie?); question is to what extent his girlfriend sees it, and if so tolerates it. This is clearly a novel of serious name-checking, which is at times fun and at times infuriating; I can keep up w/ the literary name-checks, as most readers of this type of novel can I'm sure, but there are many references to musical landmarks that totally elude me - I feel old reading this. I also feel somewhat sad for these characters, trying to write, not writing much, and drinking an absurd amount, in fact bars and clubs, even in small-town (Charlottesville) Va. seem to be at the center of their social lives and a way by which they evaluate places to live and to write. Interested so far, and waiting for relationships to develop and entwine.