"As he switches half-heartedly "from the computer to Proust," one narrator in Martin's new novel, Down Time, says, "This kind of thing was in the air, people finally starting War and Peace, The Sopranos. Like we were all getting on some long flight with aspirational content in tow." Then a bit of self-conscious throat-clearing: "While there were corpses piling up in the park.""
"Malcolm is one of four protagonists in Down Time, trading chapters with another writer, Aaron, who's trying to quit drinking; Aaron's teacher girlfriend, Cassandra; and Antonia, a college instructor gunning for the tenure track, who gets entangled with Malcolm but views him with no small amount of scorn."
Early pandemic calls for diary-keeping as historical documentation have yielded mixed results, with few works achieving the significance of classic accounts. Andrew Martin's novel Down Time explores this period through four protagonists—Malcolm, a college instructor and writer; Aaron, struggling with alcoholism; Cassandra, Aaron's teacher girlfriend; and Antonia, pursuing tenure—who embody the era's characteristic anxiety and interpersonal tension. The narrative captures the peculiar disconnect of early COVID, where people pursued aspirational activities like reading Proust while mortality surrounded them. Malcolm's defensive posture toward his girlfriend Violet, a doctor in a hospital's COVID ward, exemplifies the novel's focus on small humiliations and the paralysis of characters who accomplish little while confronting larger crises.
Read at Vulture
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]