The Generation That Got Stuck in Lockdown

The millennials in Andrew Martin’s new novel Down Time are treading water: caught between youth and age, breaking up, and settling down.

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........

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