The Generation That Got Stuck in Lockdown

Andrew Martin’s characters tend to be overeducated and underemployed. Theoretically engaged in some kind of creative practice, they’re more likely to produce aspirations (“he would read and write more, lose some weight, buy better clothes, find a nicer apartment …”) than anything resembling art. In lieu of a steady occupation, they fill their time with self-destruction, principally by ingesting illicit substances, pursuing ill-fated romances, or, whenever the opportunity presents itself, doing both at the same time. In Martin’s 2018 debut, Early Work, the relationship-ending affair between Ph.D. dropout Peter and fiction writer Leslie is lubricated, variously, by weed, tequila, whiskey, beer, and mushrooms. In “Cool for America,” the title story of his 2020 collection, an unnamed narrator flirts with his friend’s wife through a haze of booze and pain pills prescribed for his badly broken leg; later, the husband punches a beer glass into the narrator’s teeth.

Youth makes their dissipation forgivable, if not exactly sympathetic. Martin’s first two books track friends and lovers who are, for the most part, still in their early or mid-twenties, unburdened by the more immovable realities of adulthood: mortgages; offspring; diminished liver function. Even in the midst of their binges and infidelities, however, they seem to understand that they are living on borrowed time. Peter, who appears in both Early Work and Cool for America, could be speaking for any one of them when he admits, in the story “The Boy Vet,” “I was waiting, I guess, for the unforeseen motivating force that would launch me screaming into my thirties. Please stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.”

In Martin’s new novel, Down Time, that force has finally arrived. The four friends at its center—Cassandra, Malcolm, Antonia, and Aaron—are a decade or so removed from Martin’s youngest characters, closer to midlife than their bygone adolescence. But that’s not to say the book suggests maturity always correlates with age. The core cast may be older this time around, but they still feel like iterations of the same basic Martin type—self-aware self-saboteurs with a taste for mild sexual humiliation—and the book’s opening chapters feature some of his preferred narrative beats: a relapse, a risky kiss, a friends-with-benefits fling that turns sour.

This repetition is sort of the point. Like their more youthful counterparts, Down Time’s characters are treading water: trapped between addiction and sobriety, breaking up and settling down, precarious labor and professional stability. Aaron, an alcoholic, blames the eternal recurrence of his drinking problem on the fact that “everything was always the same, the same, the same,” while Malcolm, struggling to write after the release of his successful but schlocky first book, confesses in almost identical terms: “everything I did led me back to the same place.” No sooner than they’re made, however, these complaints start to feel like a cosmic joke. When the novel begins, it is January 2020. Soon, Covid-19 will arrive, and the stasis afflicting Martin’s central quartet is both frustratingly amplified and violently disrupted. On the one hand, the virus ensures that nothing will ever be the same again. But on the other, the reality of lockdown is profoundly repetitive, trapping them all in an endless present tense.

The phrase “pandemic novel” does not exactly inspire confidence. The genre is burdened by both legitimate formal challenges and what can feel like a ready-made set of critiques: How do you represent a crisis whose effects were both intimate and world-historical, and whose suffering was borne so unequally—but perhaps least of all by well-to-do writers ensconced in their Brooklyn brownstones?

While some of the earliest fiction about Covid was obviously undigested and misconceived—like the collaborative novel Fourteen Days, the publishing world’s equivalent to Gal Gadot’s much-pilloried “Imagine” video—hindsight has not necessarily proved an asset. Years later, Covid novels can still feel like a grab bag of the same handful of images and motifs: sirens, masks, vaccines; the guilt of the privileged, and the paranoia of the disenfranchised. In 2024, Katy Waldman wrote for The New Yorker that, despite superficial differences in this growing body of literature, “a single note seems to sound throughout—a tone of pummeling topicality.” Last year, in an essay that coincided with the fifth anniversary of the onset of Covid, Lily Meyer echoed the idea that pandemic novels are too carefully managed, arguing in The Atlantic that we’ve yet to see one “that truly submits to the uncontrollable reality” of that time.

Martin is clearly aware of the challenge he has set for himself. When Malcolm, isolated by social-distancing guidelines and by his girlfriend Violet’s job at a Manhattan hospital, decides to try writing something of more literary merit than his prep school murder-mystery debut, he winkingly dismisses the idea of setting a book during the pandemic. “When should it take place?” he asks himself. “Definitely not now.” This self-consciousness could easily grate, but Martin gets away with it, largely because Down Time manages to distinguish itself from other Covid novels almost immediately. Most of the literary fiction about the pandemic, from Rachel Cusk’s Second Place to Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, and Hari Kunzru’s Blue Ruin, has been an exercise in compression. Typically set over a short period of time at the height of lockdown, these novels place a group of neatly symmetrical characters—mothers and daughters; artists and patrons; couples and exes; boomers and Zoomers—in close quarters, with explosive, or cathartic, results. Down Time, by contrast, is interested in duration: how the choices we made in the weeks and months before March 2020 took on a retroactive significance, the consequences of which might not have become clear until long after the emergency subsided.

At the start of the novel, Martin’s cast of characters is wrestling with two of the most fundamental questions of literature, and indeed of life: what to do, and with whom to do it. Cassandra and Aaron are seven years into a relationship that has been marked, on Aaron’s side, by ever shorter cycles of sobriety and excess. Newly liberated from his most recent stint in rehab, he lasts less than 24 hours before succumbing to the next binge. Unbeknownst to Cassandra, however, the trigger for this latest slip is Aaron’s rehab roommate turned lover, a prodigal son of privilege named Xavier. Aaron’s desire for Xavier is equal parts exhilarating and terrifying, a threat to his self-conception as a happily partnered heterosexual man whose fantasies only occasionally verged on the benignly bi-curious. So he is relieved when Covid abruptly curtails his and Cassandra’s separation. “He wasn’t quite so solipsistic as to imagine that the virus was God’s plan for getting him back together with the girlfriend he didn’t deserve,” Martin writes of Aaron, “but it did seem like a notable coincidence.” Amid the threat of the unfamiliar, he and Cassandra become two of many who opt to cleave to the unhappiness they know.

Antonia, meanwhile, has no partner. She spent her twenties married to the academic job market as a scholar of postcolonial eco-literature, and for her efforts, she is now on the cusp of securing a tenure-track position and of publishing her second academic book. A hybrid work of cultural analysis, it argues “that climate change, as currently theorized, fit into a narrative of cultural collapse that one could find seeds of in texts and currents across the centuries ... and that, paradoxically, this patterning was dangerously insufficient because it lulled people, unconsciously, into a belief that climate, too, would follow dialectical patterns, when in fact it was an ecological event entirely unbeholden to historicizing analysis.” Down Time is noncommittal about whether we’re supposed to find this jargony project ridiculous or visionary. But it is certainly a deliberate irony that, for all the time Antonia spends thinking about the end of the world, she is totally unprepared for at least one extinction event: the end of her ambitious career, which is on a collision course with higher education’s prolonged period of Covid-induced crisis.

For Malcolm, love and work are both problems. Though living with Violet, his girlfriend of five years, he tries coming on to Antonia in one of the novel’s opening chapters—a kind of casual faithlessness that he has clearly engaged in more than once. A few years out from the release of his formulaic mystery novel, Malcolm has also failed to write, let alone sell, a follow-up. To make some money in the midst of his creative impasse, he’s agreed to teach for a semester each year at a private Catholic college in Boston, to which he commutes once a week from his home in New York. But it’s clear that he has neither passion nor a real aptitude for the job. He admits that it took sitting in on one of Antonia’s classes for him to realize that “the point was not for the professor to entertain herself, or a visiting friend of her age and level of sophistication, but to engage the students and teach them things”—such a basic tenet of pedagogy that it seems a miracle his students have learned anything at all. Caught, as he puts it, “between places, between what I’d previously thought of as discrete periods of my life,” he believes the virus will test his ability to make it to the other side.

The novel cycles between these four perspectives, covering a period of perhaps two years. It’s narrated mostly in the close third person, apart from Malcolm’s sections, which are in the first. In what is definitely not a coincidence, Malcolm appears to share several biographical details with Martin himself, from a childhood in New Jersey to a fondness for the outsider artist James Castle, about whom Martin once wrote in The New York Review of Books. (Interestingly, while she is central to much of the action, Violet is the one significant character in Down Time whose consciousness we never get access to.)

The pandemic works out nicely for Malcolm—mostly, anyway. He and Violet get married, which surprises even their parents, who “probably would have chosen ‘break up in a sea of recrimination’ over ‘randomly elope during a horrifying wave of illness.’” While they buck tradition by enlisting a cocaine-inclined dom/sub couple to be their witnesses, convention eventually reasserts itself: Soon after the wedding, Violet gets pregnant. The couple’s decisions during this period are driven by a desire for what Malcolm, with much reluctance and a touch of irony, calls “joy,” or at least for a respite from the drudgery of their Covid-shrunken lives. He greets the news of his impending fatherhood with surprising equanimity for an inveterate idler: “I was ready, I thought, for reality,” he tells us.

But one virtue of Down Time’s rotating points of view is that the image of Malcolm as a contented family man is almost immediately challenged by an Antonia chapter, in which we learn that she and Malcolm were exchanging flirty pseudo-sexts “until approximately the day Violet gave birth.” More than that, she reveals, the creative side of his life remains far less settled than the domestic one: His desire to become a more authentic writer has met the exigencies of paying for a child, to the point that he’s applied for a teaching job at his old prep school, “something he’d previously said he would contemplate only if he had a traumatic brain injury.”

For all its imperfections, including a bout with serious depression, Malcolm’s trajectory is still an enviable one. The cosmic game of musical chairs ends in his favor. The same can’t be said of Cassandra and Aaron, whose largely sexless reunion at the start of lockdown inevitably implodes, though not until well after normal life has begun to resume. The dam finally breaks when Aaron finds out, a week after the fact, that Xavier has OD’d. The depth of his grief is impossible to hide from Cassandra, who, it turns out, has herself just hooked up with a member of her book club—an event she isn’t sure whether to characterize as a betrayal or an act of ethical nonmonogamy. (Their confrontation results in one of the novel’s most regrettable lines of dialogue: “I’ve got cum in my hair. Like, presently. So that’s me,” she tells Aaron, as encouragement to open up.) Were it not for the pandemic, Down Time implies, their relationship might have died the natural death it was already limping toward. Instead, it was put on life support, to no end but the prolonged suffering of the patients. They’ve both lost crucial time: for sexual self-discovery on Aaron’s part, and for finding a relationship of true mutuality on Cassandra’s.

Pandemic time cheats Antonia in a different way. Abruptly cut off from the dream of a stable professorship by her university’s Covid-era belt-tightening—and some unfavorable student reviews from the difficult return-to-campus period—she is filled with despair at the folly of all that she has sacrificed in its pursuit: romantic love and the possibility of living anywhere besides Boston, to name just two examples. It amazes her, “when she allowed herself to reflect on it, that this vocation, which had meant more to her than anything else ever had, was becoming just another thing lost in this era of infinite decimation.” Antonia enters a prolonged period of regression that runs the gamut from drinking pulls of warm vodka hidden in her mother’s laundry room to humiliating herself in a misguided quest for the affections of a young composer of experimental noise music. More so than any other character, she seems emblematic of the mass impetuousness that the reopening of the world seemed to usher in—or as Martin described it in an interview with The New Yorker, “the intense emotions and acting out provoked by intimacy after these periods of isolation.”

Down Time doesn’t leave us without hope for its less fortunate trio: Aaron, Antonia, and Cassandra each take some fumbling steps toward a new life (or in Cassandra’s case, at least a new haircut). But these intimations of progress are ultimately compensations for a deeper truth: that “they were, later than they’d thought they’d be, starting over.” The pandemic imposed unique setbacks on every generation—learning loss for the very young; failure to launch for the recent college grad—but Martin’s novel is particularly interested in the melancholy of emerging from the pandemic’s disorienting depths on the cusp of middle age and finding yourself suddenly lapped by most of your peers.

With its time-lapse approach to depicting the pandemic, Down Time could hardly be accused of pummeling readers with topicality, to borrow Katy Waldman’s turn of phrase. But there is at least one respect in which the novel’s channeling of the Covid era feels like box-checking, and that’s in its approach to the tumultuous political environment of 2020. Notably, almost every depiction of current events is mediated in some way. Early on, before the virus reaches American shores, Cassandra listens to a fatuous NPR segment about a wind farm on the U.S.-Mexico border that employs both retired border agents and the formerly undocumented; it is even further abstracted by the station’s suspiciously chipper translation of what she notes sound like much more complicated statements in the original Spanish. Later, in the summer of 2020, Antonia watches Fox News coverage of the shooting of Patriot Prayer supporter Aaron Danielson on her mother’s TV. This is, on the one hand, an accurate representation of how many of us experienced the world during lockdown: on screens inside our homes. But the same formal strategy applies even to situations that Martin’s characters are around to witness.

Malcolm and Violet live in Brooklyn, next door to a police station. That proximity makes the protests that roiled the city after the murder of George Floyd impossible to ignore, and Malcolm gets involved to an extent, showing up to marches with signs. We don’t find this out from one of his chapters, though; the information comes to us from Antonia’s perspective, via an email exchange between the two of them. It’s an odd choice, as if the text were performing its own reluctance to address the fallout from Floyd’s death. Not that Down Time ultimately has that much to say about it. Malcolm’s message accurately ventriloquizes a certain kind of urban left-liberal’s ambivalent feelings about the efficacy of mass protest—“I don’t know, it feels like it’s becoming just another thing, a routine. I’m not sure it’s really doing anything,” he confesses—but to what end isn’t quite clear. Do we actually learn anything new from his observations, about Malcolm himself or the events of the very recent past?

The curious handling of the protests points to a broader sense of weightlessness in Down Time. The novel is thick with specific cultural references—Stanley Cavell, Arthur Russell, Denis Johnson—and teeming with the kind of secondary characters who are all too often missing from the alienated, hermetic worlds of much contemporary fiction: acquaintances, stepsiblings, flings. Yet rarely does this wealth of detail serve more than an expository function. Near the end of the novel, Antonia finds herself considering “the chain of people stretching across her recent life.” “They had taken up so much space,” she reflects. “But what did you do with that accumulation? It didn’t seem to add up to enough.” You could say the same thing about the hundreds of pages that preceded this line.

This might be where the limits of the pandemic novel, even a pretty good one, finally assert themselves. Six years after the world shut down, we are still living with the aftershocks of that moment, from a supercharged skepticism about the scientific establishment and institutions in general, to a decay in social niceties once taken for granted. But, as even these familiar points probably suggest, there simply may not be much insight left to wring from an event that has been processed countless times—in novels and newspapers, on the nightly news and in the endless scroll of social media feeds. Down Time is refreshingly original in its choice to plot the pandemic as a point on a timeline that extends in either direction, rather than viewing it in isolation. Even so, it can’t quite escape the appearance of a diorama: a faithful re-creation attesting mostly to the patient attention it took to construct. As far as diversions go, there are far worse ways to spend your downtime.