During the Worst of Times, Behave Badly

Down Time, Andrew Martin’s second novel, is a hilarious, unconventional, and thought-provoking millennial coming-of-middle-age page-turner, and one of the first great novels to directly engage with the 2020 pandemic and its unresolved tremors. This is the kind of juicy, zippy, compulsively readable book that goes down easy but will leave you chewing on its questions—how to be honest with oneself and others, how to exist in a world burning beneath our feet without self-immolating, how to balance passion with responsibility and doubt, how to love and be loved despite ourselves—long afterward.

When Martin’s much-lauded debut novel, Early Work, appeared in 2018, I hesitated at first to read it. The book seemed practically concocted for me specifically to enjoy, and I was struck by the same uncanny parasocial feeling as receiving a friend request from someone the algorithm had been pushing for months, a People You May Know But Haven’t Bothered To Yet. When I finally picked up a copy, I couldn’t tell if I’d love it or hate it, but I felt certain whatever reaction I had would be a strong one. Early Work turned out to be the rare book I inhaled in a single cackling sitting. In Martin’s sharp, sly, and self-implicating prose, I found an unsparing portrait of a certain kind of callow, ambitious creative, equal parts fuck-up and artist, that I recognized from dive bars and dating apps and my own mirror. I was jealous I hadn’t written it myself.

Little did I know that when I began my own writing life in earnest, it would be Andrew Martin guiding my first MFA workshop, and my suspicion that I’d want to be friends with whoever wrote Early Work would be confirmed. In contrast to the characters he puts on the page, Andrew is a warm, unassuming presence whose generosity and gentleness soften the exacting precision of his craft, though he’s every bit as witty and observant as his work.

I sat down with Andrew in a quiet Brooklyn café to discuss sex, drugs, and lockdown; the stickiness of writing about relationship dynamics; and how narrative instability might conquer AI. 

Sarah Bess Jaffe: Not that the characters in Down Time are having a good time in any conventional sense of the term, but I found myself envious of the pandemic they’re having. They’re indulging in really plush, luxurious depressions and substance abuse and weird sex stuff. I wasn’t doing any of that shit. But they’re socializing. They’re having affairs. Was it the pandemic setting that coalesced these characters around this particular novel? 

Andrew Martin: Yeah, the pandemic really brought them together! I wrote this book in an unhelpfully abstruse, totally all-over-the-place way over many years, and it was exciting to see the pieces eventually coalesce around certain themes and around a certain period. The way I wrote the book accidentally ended up working well with the subject matter, because it ended up simulating the way that time slowed down during the pandemic years, but also that when things did happen, they felt so sudden and extreme. When the characters in the book do interact with other people, it’s almost always a crisis. 

SBJ: The form kind of echoes the content, mimicking a lot of how we maintain friendships.

AM: Especially now. In the previous decade of my life, I moved around a lot, and then with the pandemic, I didn’t see some people for years. When we emerged, I was suddenly seeing them for the first time in forever, and it felt very weird. 

A lot of the formal features of the book also ended up echoing some of my dissatisfactions with contemporary social life more broadly. Early Work is certainly not utopian, but it’s also a certain vision of life lived IRL, where everyone’s just hanging out all the time. That was sort of what life in grad school and the years after was like for me. And Down Time feels much more like what my 30s were, much more diffuse and discursive. Harder to pin anybody down, harder to pin yourself down.

SBJ: One of the things I admired about this book is that it gets at this idea that you can be living through historic, unprecedented times, and you’re still completely obsessed with the narcissistic minutiae of being a person.

AM: It’s true, I think! The novel probably plays down the degree to which I was in a total panic about the pandemic for at least a year, sometimes in ways that didn’t even make sense in retrospect. I tried to capture that a little bit: the abstract fear of doing the wrong thing and getting in trouble for being bad. For me that became more present than actually being afraid of getting sick. Before the vaccine, I also didn’t want to get COVID, obviously, but it became clear at a certain point that it probably wasn’t going to kill me. It did kill my grandmother, and other people in my life. So the worry was warranted, but the worrying didn’t change anything. But life was also going on. I got married during the pandemic. Other people I know got married or had kids during those years because we were in our mid-to-late 30s and if it was going to happen, it had to happen. A few people I knew were giving birth in, like, April 2020. It was just a mess. I felt like there hadn’t been much written about how life had to just keep happening and people had to figure out ways to make it work. 

SBJ: The novel has three third-person POVs and one first-person POV, which creates interesting gaps in reliability. 

AM: The one first-person character, Malcolm, is sort of anchoring the novel as the only direct speaker. The implication is not necessarily that he’s writing the whole thing, but I think the fact that he’s a novelist made it make sense to have him be the one narrating voice, because he’s the guy who fancies himself the storyteller, in a fairly egotistical way. He’s the most obnoxious person in the book, and also the character who looks the most like me from the outside, so I was willing to let him take the fall as the bad guy. 

My other thought was that having one first person narrator does something to unbalance the smoothness of a traditional third person roundelay, and maybe it’s more interesting if there’s this weird thing sticking out of it, to make you realize it’s a written piece, and forcing you to switch gears while you’re reading.

SBJ: It also allows a nice window into being able to write about his partner Violet’s experience as a doctor during the pandemic without having to inhabit that character. 

AM: I can’t decide yet whether it’s a failure of nerve not to have narrated the doctor from inside the hospital. Full disclosure: My wife is a doctor who was in the hospitals during the height of COVID, and had an experience not unlike Violet’s experience. Even being that close to it—probably because I was that close to it—I felt like I couldn’t narrate it. It didn’t feel like a violation, exactly, but it was something I couldn’t quite get my head around inhabiting. It’s not a perfectly balanced novel, and I tried to embrace that imperfection as a feature rather than a bug. I did think for a while, Oh, gosh, I really need to do Violet’s POV. And then I just couldn’t make it work on a technical level. 

SBJ: In addition to being a doctor, your wife [Laura Kolbe] is also a writer. It’s a very sensitive thing to use somebody else’s material. 

AM: She’s written beautifully and extensively about her experience being in the hospitals during that time. And so, right, my book creeps up on “her material,” but I ended up writing it from the me-character’s side of things. I haven’t seen this perspective as much, what it’s like to be at home worrying while your partner is out there on the front lines. I thought it was territory that was sort of unclaimed.

SBJ: What was that like, to write through that relationship while living your real relationship?

AM: I mean, we’re both writers, as you noted, and we very much believe we should write whatever we need to write. We also read each other’s work and give critiques of it on what is, theoretically, a craft level. But then we’re also humans who have feelings. And so one finds oneself in a very strange position where she might say, You know, I think you need to beef up Violet’s character a little bit. And we both try to sort through the craft side of a note from the personal side. She writes poetry that’s sometimes about me, about our relationship, and at a certain point the ability to judge it on a pure craft level becomes pretty much impossible. At certain points we’ve both had to say, “This isn’t how I see it, but I bless the work.” It’s messy. I feel like it would be harder if we weren’t both writers, because at least we both understand fundamentally what’s going on. To me, it’s exciting and interesting and ultimately good to have to work through those things.

SBJ: You mentioned the fear that I think we all had during the pandemic: I don’t want to do the wrong thing, it feels like we have this group project and I don’t want to fuck it up for everybody. But the characters are so not concerned about doing the right thing interpersonally.

AM: Maybe this is the millennial condition. Very worried about how it’s all gonna look, but not that worried about fucking each other over.

SBJ: Speaking of fucking each other, there’s so much interesting stuff going on in the book about gender and sex and power. Can you talk a little bit about how you see that working?

AM: I used the word utopian when I was talking about Early Work, and though there’s very little in Down Time that feels utopian on the surface, the book is messing around with gender binaries and sexuality binaries. The world I want to live in is one where people are much more fluid. That’s something I’m interested in putting on the page and trying to will into existence through the writing. It’s aspirational for a lot of the characters, as it is for many humans; actually acting upon it is harder. The reality of other people, the reality of trying to pin down your identity or define it, is quite hard. Most of the characters are lapsed Catholics and have all kinds of shame and guilt and fucked-up feelings about their desires that’s affecting everyone’s ability to act on what they want.

SBJ: These are all characters who are grappling with their ambition and self-worth and identity during a time of widespread breakdown between public and private personae.

AM: And spoiler alert: one of the characters comes into his sexuality as, at least, bisexual over the course of the novel. Part of it is prompted by him being in rehab, but then him trying to figure out how to be out, or the degree to which to embrace that, gets very tied up in pandemic logic. Like, he can’t really go out, he has this relationship with a guy that is almost entirely over text. A lot of the relationships in the book get very tangled in being stuck together versus wanting to be able to explore other possibilities. I do think sometimes that if only everyone had a fully transparent picture of each other’s feelings, we’d all be in a better place.

SBJ: Hearing you talk about it, there’s so much optimism and desire for utopia. And a lot of your writing is so pessimistic.

AM: It’s really dark, I know. But I think I’m trying to show the obverse, or I’m showing the failures of communication that lead to so much of the unhappiness, I guess. Maybe it’s a fantasy of what I wish were possible.

SBJ: There’s also the fantasy element of making people behave so unbelievably badly in fiction, in ways the writer would never do. 

AM: So you think.

SBJ: Right. Obviously there’s some kind of latent desire to behave badly or you wouldn’t write about it.

AM: I feel like this is a real Philip Roth thing. He talks about this very eloquently in some interviews. What does a writer get off on (metaphorically speaking)? For some writers, it’s imagining a worse version of themselves; for some, it’s imagining a better version of themselves. This is an extreme example, but [Roth] talks about Céline, who was an anti-Semite and fascist, but apparently, according to Roth, quite a good and compassionate doctor. But in his writings, he’s an evil, bad doctor, because he gets off on being evil. And William Carlos Williams, for whatever reason, is inspired to make himself a good doctor. He was, apparently, a pretty good doctor, but the image of himself in his work is heroic. There’s no reason I couldn’t write more heroic versions of myself. For whatever reason I find it more interesting to write more cowardly, more unkind, less talented versions of myself.

SBJ: The book is almost a Rube Goldberg machine of trapping these characters in a momentum of worse and worse decisions.

AM: That’s what I like to see! In books, that is, not in real life. This comes up with my students a lot. One in ten fledgling novelists is too protective of their characters, and I find myself arguing that they need to be harder on them. You need to let them do something worse or have something bad happen to them. You can’t protect them. And they might say, Well, but in real life, everything kind of worked out. Yeah, this is why we have an opportunity here.

I understand the instinct. Even saying that, I’m probably still not hard enough on my characters sometimes. What Aaron is doing to himself early in the novel is suicidal. It’s very self-destructive, this kind of drinking, this kind of drug use, this kind of total recklessness with your being. I’ve seen a decent amount of that up close, and so I feel comfortable—I mean, not comfortable—but I feel like I can write about that with confidence.

Some things in the book were very hard to write, because they’re inchoate, hard-to-talk-about things. Aaron and his relationship with his father is one example. He’s trying to figure out how to talk to this man of another generation about his complicated sexuality and complicated desires: To me, that’s really interesting, this intergenerational stuff. It’s hot material because I genuinely don’t know if they can understand each other. 

SBJ: If you’ve created characters who feel like they’re really living on the page, you can kind of do social experiments with them.

AM: Right. I’m always having characters that are sort of like me or sort of like my friends think or do things that I or they didn’t do. But: What if they did? It can get hard to keep track of what actually happened versus what you make up, especially with a book like this that I’ve lived inside of off and on for, like, six, seven years. Some of it feels more real to me than my real life. And my books all sort of take place in the same world and are speaking to each other in all these ways. The timelines, if you tried to make them, would not make any sense. Bolaño is one of the writers I love who does this—characters across his books might even have the same names, but they’re clearly different people. I like the instability of these doppelgangers and narrative dead ends. I like an unstable text.

SBJ: An unstable universe or an unstable work of fiction and unstable work of art is maybe something that is fundamentally human.

AM: The tech may reach a point soon where it figures out that what makes something great is having some weird flaws in it. Like if you keep telling the AI that Moby Dick is the greatest novel written in English, it’s like, okay, so great novels involve narrative instability, monologues that the point of view character couldn’t have heard, digressions about marine biology . . . I’m a full techno-pessimist, but maybe part of my full techno-pessimism is that, yeah, of course the machines are going to figure it out. To me, it’s almost religious, the degree to which you just have to reject it. I don’t care if it’s better. Or, you know, “better.” It doesn’t fucking matter. If it’s not made by a human, it’s not good. You just have to take it on faith. I know it’s kind of stupid to say that, to say, I will reject work that is objectively better; if the machine makes something better than Tolstoy, I will refuse it. But you just gotta be stupid.

SBJ: I mean, you have to be stupid to make anything, too. 

AM: You have to. I remember when I was younger somebody asked me what my goal was as a writer. I was like, I want to write Anna Karenina. And they were like, Well, you’re not going to. Yeah, I know. But if you’re not trying to do that, what are you doing here?