DOWN TIME

Five millennial friends navigate love and loss in the early days of Covid-19.

The five 30-something people at the heart of Martin’s latest novel are far from perfect, but they’re trying their best—most of them, anyway. There’s Boston writer Aaron—“smart and kind and endlessly curious when he was sober, and a weeping, pants-pissing maniac when he got drunk”—who has just been released from a rehab center and relapses less than 24 hours later, much to the consternation of his partner, Cassandra, a teacher who forgives his infidelity and addiction because “he was, alas, interesting.” Malcolm, a smart if a bit pretentious writer and professor, splits his time between Boston, where he teaches, and New York, where he lives with his partner, Violet, a doctor who finds herself losing patience with Malcolm’s series of existential crises. Finally, there’s Antonia, a teaching fellow who doesn’t know what she’ll do if she doesn’t get on the tenure track at Harvard—or, for that matter, what she’ll do if she does. Their lives are all thrown into disarray, first by the death of their mutual friend, Sam, a charming punk who’s killed after being hit by a car, and then by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which strains their jobs and living arrangements. Martin writes about his characters with a mix of affection and bemusement; as he demonstrated in his earlier books, Early Work (2018) and Cool for America (2020), he has an impressive psychological insight, understanding why people make decisions that they know will be bad for them, and why love and attraction can be so stubbornly capricious. Crucially, this is also a very funny novel: In one scene, characters watch a “silly news show hosted by the high-handed Englishman who pretended he was flabbergasted by American politics and, like, the existence of hamburgers.” This is a wonderfully charming novel.

Another impressive book by one of the country’s most talented authors of comic fiction.