Bad for people, great for fiction
A Q&A with Andrew Martin
Perhaps Drift contributor Andrew Martin had a premonition, when he titled his 2018 debut novel Early Work, that its publication would be followed by a relentless string of the kind of events about which one naturally speaks in terms of before and after. Arguably the most seismic, the Covid pandemic, forms the background of his latest work, Down Time, which recounts the interconnected stories of five friends contending with both personal and global crises. To celebrate its publication today, Drift editor Rebecca Panovka spoke with Martin about pandemic fiction, formal adventurousness, and the shortcomings of heterosexual monogamy.
You’ve previously published a novel and a collection of stories. Down Time is somewhere in between. How did you land on its form?
Ha, I figured I’d just do the hardest possible thing — write a full-length novel but give each chapter the plot arc and precision of a short story. The first two chapters began life as stories, and they led to a vision of a book that would track a full year, month by month, following a different character in each chapter. But I quickly realized that it would be much more satisfying to follow these particular characters forward in time, and that developing their connections would turn it into, you know, a real novel. Structurally, it still felt right to do it episodically, to check in on these characters at different intervals to track the way they’re dealing with crises in their lives. Given that much of the book takes place during the pandemic era, I liked the idea that these different chapters mirror the characters’ geographic isolation from each other. Alan Hollinghurst was a big formal influence, though my version is more chopped up than his books usually are. I have a shorter attention span than him, I guess.
The narratives in Down Time are loosely linked by friendships and romantic histories, as well as the death of a shared friend. How did you think of her role?
Sam’s death towards the beginning of the novel serves as an early warning to the novel’s characters that hard times are ahead. In my own life, an old friend I hadn’t seen in years, Fiona, died in a climbing accident in February of 2020, and the shock of that has always felt to me like the kickoff to the extremely disorienting and sad year that followed. Narratively, Sam links two of the characters together through the revelation that she was romantically/sexually involved with both of them at different times, and that prefigures the way that the whole novel is sort of fueled by desire, sometimes desire for the “wrong” people. None of the characters in the book are able to fully quit each other, but Sam’s loss drives home the fact they aren’t going to live forever, no matter how much yearning they do. Of course, this only makes them even more desperate for what they can’t have.
Through these different characters and couples, you seem to be asking questions about heterosexual monogamy and its shortcomings. Why was the pandemic a useful frame for that kind of probing?
When lockdowns in New York (and elsewhere) began, so many people I know suddenly saw their relationships accelerate. Casual things turned into moving in together, long-term quasi-marriages either became more committed or fell apart. Divorced people reconciled, single people... had a really bad time. The emotional claustrophobia of the time produced real dramatic tension. Everyone was trapped in their own little Sam Shepard play. My characters aren’t great at heterosexual monogamy in the best of times (I mean, who is?), but this situation sends their restlessness to an even more volatile place. I think for these characters, the realization that one person can’t, or shouldn’t, serve every role in one’s life — best friend, sex partner, professional/artistic support, etc. — happens in a very compressed way because of the circumstances, but I think it’s a problem that most couples, heterosexual or otherwise, eventually have to face. “Asking questions” is right; the answers remain pretty nebulous. But I’m less pessimistic about relationships in real life than I am on the page. I think.
Down Time could be called “pandemic fiction.” How do you think about that burgeoning genre? Why has fiction had such a hard time treating the period well? And how did you want to treat it here?
I think any time you’re writing about a recent historic event, there’s a risk of relying on familiar tropes at the expense of more specific observations and insights. If I’d set out to write “pandemic fiction” I might have felt obliged to hit certain beats, to write something representative of the period or whatever. It felt like a point of pride for me to not avoid the difficulty of writing about those years, to try to write through them and find original things to notice and think about. I wanted the pandemic to serve as the background for the dramas of these characters’ lives, a steady pulse of dread and anxiety that animates their plans for the future. People had to find a way to keep doing things under insane circumstances. I understand the desire to never think about that time again, but I think there’s more juicy — and even fun! — stuff there than people want to admit.
In your 2022 Dispatch for The Drift, you wrote: “We do seem to be experiencing the spirit of revival again, perhaps less because we’re at the end of something and more because we’re still in the middle of it, caught between Trump and Covid and awaiting the unforeseeable repercussions of both... I don’t think we’ve figured out the form and the tone with which to confront the ugliness and grief we’ve all lived through, are still living through.” In some ways, Down Time seems to be attempting a form and tone “with which to confront the ugliness and grief we’ve all lived through.” How much were you thinking through the post-Trump, post-pandemic literary moment, and the need for a new form? And do you still think about our literary moment in the same way?
As a pundit, I’m very comfortable opining about the literary landscape; as a practitioner, I’m just grabbing hold of whatever I can to stay afloat. I did write that dispatch while in the midst of drafting this novel, so I think I was reminding myself of what I wanted to do, and what I wanted to see other people do. Goading myself on. Obviously, I was right to be pessimistic about the cultural landscape, and A.I. wasn’t even on my radar at that point. We’re on the other side of the (Biden?) interregnum now, fully in the soup. This book is dark, but given where we are now, it doesn’t feel nearly dark enough. On an aesthetic level, if nothing else, I feel excited about the possibilities presented by the feeling that there isn’t much left to lose. I want to get weirder and wilder, more formally adventurous, and I hope other writers do, too. Now’s the time.
