The Seinfeld Principle of COVID Fiction
“We’re living in a society!” the Seinfeld character George Costanza sputters when strangers wrong him. It’s a justly famous line. Seinfeld’s nine seasons are an extended ode to irritation as the greatest enforcer of social norms, made funnier by the fact that the show’s protagonists are all irritating. The series demonstrates the joys of fictional annoyance. An encounter that could wreck a day in real life can, on-screen or in a book, give the audience an enjoyable sense of righteousness—or recognition. Annoying characters let us admit that we might be annoying too.
The novelist Andrew Martin follows the Seinfeld principle closely. His 2018 debut, Early Work, and his follow-up story collection, Cool for America, feature too-smart Millennials who have too much time on their hands and use it poorly. Their behavior often strains the limits of readers’ tolerance, and their troubles tend to be richly deserved. But like Jonathan Franzen, his direct predecessor in literary annoyance, Martin uses his gifts as a prose stylist to get readers to remain with these aggravating protagonists long enough to develop sympathy for them. Down Time, his most recent novel, puts this technique to an especially rigorous test. The book follows a group of entitled 30-somethings sulking through the first year of the coronavirus pandemic, and Martin uses annoyance to make it work.
I’ve written before about my frustration with literature that concentrates on describing the pandemic, as if seeking to record it for posterity or remind readers of what they went through. Many of these works seem to check the boxes of memory, going wide rather than deep. In fact, Down Time is the first novel I’ve encountered that vividly evokes the pre-vaccine months without falling into that trap. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Martin expressed bemusement that more authors weren’t digging into “the ambiguous etiquette surrounding almost any social activity, the intense emotions and acting out provoked by intimacy after these periods of isolation,” which he saw as “ripe for fictional use.” In Down Time, he deploys the strangeness of those months to highlight and exacerbate not only his characters’ obnoxious qualities but also their real individual woes.
No one in Down Time has issues that begin during or because of the pandemic. Aaron and Malcolm, the book’s two male protagonists, are both alcoholics; the novel starts with Aaron leaving rehab some months before the virus starts spreading in the United States. From the get-go, Martin makes clear that these characters’ addictions neither excuse nor explain their tendency toward self-involvement—a trait everyone in Down Time shares. Once COVID breaks out, a mix of luck and wealth insulates all of them but Violet, a doctor, from its horrors, and Martin uses the pressures of lockdown to make his irritating characters even more irritating. He achieves this not through satire—a crude tool ill-suited to a subject as tricky as the pandemic—but through acute psychological observation.
Martin’s interest in annoyance serves him well here. Rather than concentrate on the heroism or fear that readers likely remember in themselves and others, he writes about the cowardice and grievances that many would be thrilled to forget. Often, this means that judging and connecting with the characters are equally present and compelling options: I would never do this and I think I did this coexist in Down Time. It also means that Martin’s writing about COVID, far from acquiring the stale effect that comes from conveying widely shared memories, is sharp, off-kilter, and particular. For me, the emblematic image of the novel comes from Malcolm and Violet’s pandemic elopement, witnessed only by a pair of friends, Grant and Chelsea, who like to flaunt their kinkiness. “In the pictures,” Martin writes, “you can’t even see the ball gag under Chelsea’s face mask, unless you know to look.”
Down Time starts with Aaron’s girlfriend, Cassandra, picking him up from rehab. Although they live in Boston, she takes him to New York for a celebratory weekend. She and Aaron have been together for years, and this trip to rehab isn’t his first; still, Cassandra “hadn’t considered the fact that it might not be a good idea to celebrate finishing rehab at all.” Her self-absorption in this moment is characteristic of Down Time. So is Martin’s ability to shift seamlessly from inside Cassandra’s head to the godlike narratorial vantage he uses to warn the reader that the celebration weekend is, unsurprisingly, going to go wrong.
Martin employs that same authorial remove to let readers know that the pandemic is coming. Cassandra’s celebration includes tickets to an opera that Aaron asks to leave at the first intermission; Martin jumps briefly forward to write that once lockdown begins, Cassandra “thought reproachfully that he would have been just fine sitting through one more act, maybe two.” For her, having to leave the opera is arguably worse than Aaron’s pain—a channeling of selfishness through dedication to art that is classic Martin. Condemning her for it is easy, but so is identifying with her quarantine longing for “public life and the places that had sustained her.”
Cassandra seems largely unaware of the smallness of her feelings. So does her friend Antonia, for whom the pandemic’s greatest challenge is the disruption to her sense of progress; a tenure-track academic job and a solid relationship, both goals that she’d thought she was close to achieving, now seem unattainable. But Malcolm, whose girlfriend, Violet, is treating COVID patients at a Manhattan hospital, is smacked up against his own pettiness. He swiftly registers that “the reality of what Violet was experiencing remained basically unimaginable to me, perhaps because I did not want to imagine it. But I had to try.” In that spirit, he decides that if Violet “got sick, I wanted to get sick, too, in solidarity. It was the least I could do.”
Violet is the only character whose perspective Martin never inhabits—a noticeable decision, given that he roams at will through the heads of the novel’s other main characters. By refraining from writing her thoughts, he clarifies that Down Time isn’t interested in the COVID heroism that, at least to Malcolm, she represents. But the novel isn’t just a realistic chronicle of the pandemic precisely as sheltered Millennials in the Northeast experienced it. Rather, it explores its characters’ reluctance to grow. Antonia, Malcolm, and Cassandra don’t want the outside world to alter them. All three see themselves as too smart to be changed against their will, even by a pandemic.
[Read: The literature of the pandemic is already here]
Aaron serves as the point of contrast and complication that Down Time needs; without him, the novel could have been one-note on the human aversion to change. After years of rejecting the prospect of personal evolution, he grudgingly accepts that he has to stop drinking. Cassandra’s ill-advised New York weekend precipitates this development, and lockdown (of which he thinks, “Please, he’d been in jail; this was a friendly public health advisory”) is a practical help. Sobriety and the self-reflection to which it leads are easier for Aaron in relative isolation. Martin is clear that this is individual, not inevitable: Even as Aaron successfully resists alcohol in quarantine, Malcolm’s drinking habits get significantly and somewhat willfully worse.
Cassandra has a similarly concerning trajectory, though hers raises more ethical questions than Malcolm’s. Aaron’s sobriety, intriguingly, is bad for their relationship; Cassandra insists on remaining with him anyway, though she offers and he seeks no support. Cassandra knows to be troubled by this, yet by the time lockdown restrictions begin lifting, she’s discovered inside herself—and to some degree embraced—the “hard core of uncaring” that the reader sensed, from the very start of the book, was there.
But Down Time is not uncaring toward its protagonists. Martin writes tenderly and observantly about the obtuse, callous people he has created. He attends closely to their idiosyncrasies and guides them gently in the direction not only of survival but of a fuller reintegration with post-lockdown society than readers might imagine possible. Here, Malcolm’s story is the most interesting. Applying George Costanza’s refrain to the early months of COVID could seem at once urgent (We live in a society! Put your mask on!) and absurd (We live in a society, sure, but we never get to see anyone). For Malcolm, sitting in his apartment in Brooklyn, absurdity takes over. The wider world in which Violet participates becomes less and less real, until their relationship is his only tether to it—and, relatedly, his only source of motivation. He goes nowhere near his novel-in-progress until Violet tells him she’ll sleep with him only on days he’s gotten 1,000 words on the page.
Martin is the rare literary writer with an evident interest in straight sex, which he explores throughout Early Work and via Malcolm and Violet’s relationship in Down Time. In the early days of COVID, the two have “intense, desperate sex, some real going-off-to-war shit, Violet the soldier, obviously, me the sad helpmeet in a kerchief scanning the sky for returning planes. After that the foxhole got less, you know, foxy.”
Malcolm’s resentment of this decreased foxiness leads to the sex-for-words bargain. It also generates a conversation that encapsulates the whole book. Violet, exhausted from the ER, requests that Malcolm complain less about how hard quarantine is for him; Malcolm admits that he’s being juvenile but adds that it’s difficult to sit with his “feelings all day and not be allowed to express them at night.” In this moment, he could hardly be more irritating, yet he does have a right to talk about his feelings. Martin challenges readers to simultaneously condemn and empathize with Malcolm—and, perhaps, with their past self or others in their life. Behaving immaturely at times during quarantine was all but inevitable. Malcolm’s childishness is frustrating to read about, but the scene invites some retroactive grace.
Of all the ways that novelists can tackle COVID, writing juvenile and self-absorbed characters isn’t the one I would have expected to like. As an ardent Seinfeld fan, I should have known better. Quarantine and its immediate aftermath both wrecked and created norms. At the same time, the terror of the disease made even very serious problems seem temporarily minor. Martin’s characters’ troubles pale next to those of the ICU nurses in Susan Straight’s Sacrament, a book published last year that is, to my knowledge, the first novel about COVID from a working-class perspective. Sacrament suffers from its admiration for its characters, though. Down Time never has to manage the weight of worthiness. Instead, it raises the same questions that lockdown did: How badly can you behave during a crisis? How responsible do we have to be for one another? Annoying to contemplate, yes—but it’s part of living in a society.