DOWN TIME, by Andrew Martin
“Down Time,” from the first, is both on solid ground and falling apart. The opening scene finds Cassandra, a 30-something teacher, picking up her writer boyfriend, Aaron, from rehab. Aaron, a drinker at the very least, has dried out, and his reward is a drive down from Boston to New York for a rejoin-the-world opera outing.
The tone is familiar — a straightforward dramatic rendering of these characters’ lives, with a dusting of satire — but the setting is one of radical destabilization, in that the events take place just as American society is being remade by Covid. Everyone remembers the articles about the pressures of the pandemic on certain couples. Cassandra and Aaron are one of those couples.
In Andrew Martin’s keenly observed and fitfully propulsive novel, the two of them are surrounded by a circle of friends and lovers (some are both, sometimes in secret). There’s Malcolm, an author casting around for a good project. There’s Antonia, an academic writing about the language used to describe environmental collapse. There’s Sam, unseen, recently deceased.
The connections here are largely sexual. Cassandra and Aaron are finding their way back into bed. Malcolm once slept with Cassandra and has recently reupped. Sam, who was bi, was multiply involved. Around the main characters are another dozen or so more marginal ones in the form of partners, parents and old college roommates. We follow the central living four — Cassandra, Aaron, Malcolm and Antonia — in turn, in no discernible pattern. All are portrayed in the third person except Malcolm, who is promoted to first.
This is the setup, and it owes more than a little to “La Ronde,” Arthur Schnitzler’s classic Austrian drama. But the demographics of “Down Time” pose a problem. In populating this world almost entirely with articulate, introverted, earnest-even-when-ironic East Coast types, Martin risks a novel weighed down with commentary, not to mention one in which the stakes (sexual satisfaction and identity, creative achievement and reward) wash out somewhat. It’s not that the characters are hermetic, exactly, but they are monocultural, which means that the whole sometimes feels like less than the sum of its parts.
The sense of range constraint is exacerbated by the characters’ unrelenting 30-somethingness. This is a world largely without children, which is perfectly fine for the characters — Jason Bateman and Charli XCX agree on this — but risks narrative drive. The world here largely begins and ends with these characters and their self-created crises.
This problem is perhaps most evident in its absence. When Cassandra visits her friend Francesca, an Italian woman with a European disdain for American earnestness and panic, the two of them talk while Francesca’s son plays in the yard with Cassandra’s new puppy. There’s a lifting of the claustrophobia, if not in her mind then in ours.
Generally, the secondary characters deepen and complicate the world more successfully than the primary ones. Violet, Malcolm’s partner, is a doctor pulled into early pandemic response, which gives her a solidity that eludes the others. The same is true of Aaron’s father, who appears briefly but movingly, and of even more minor figures, like a man from Cassandra’s book group and Antonia’s ailing grandmother.
Not all of them hit. Malcolm’s friend Thomas’s father, a conspiracy-minded senior who has penned a paranoid thriller, leads to a pitfall — he draws out Malcolm’s writerly thoughts about writing, which can seem like they are ventriloquizing the author’s own doubts.
The doubts are largely unwarranted, at least as far as the prose is concerned. It is good throughout, and often far better than that. The author sees the world sharply (you aren’t the only one who has noticed the preponderance of “Shantaram” paperbacks in the world), is refreshingly unafraid of writing about sex, and can be extremely funny, which is not easy on the page. Many lines zing. Of one character: “She’d begun to speak in paragraphs.” Of another: “Fear of sincerity ran deep in this family.” And a third: “Cute, small, evil. A ghost.”
But the characters and the structure do not always rise to the level of the writing. Aaron, for example, is slow to hold himself to account as he struggles with sobriety and sexuality, and is quick to judge others. It’s puzzling to cede the first chapter to him and his attempt at redemption, and when he resurfaces, he frustrates.
Similarly, there are passages that mostly seem like opportunities for the characters — and by extension the author — to deliver monologues about various aspects of the world: how dogs are walked, casual fashion, Bernie Sanders. These stretches are inoffensive but also not particularly adhesive.
And yet, just when “Down Time” begins to feel desultory, it pushes into purpose. A pair of late chapters, including an impromptu wedding for one of the core four and a new relationship for another, are more grounded and gratifying. A portrait of a conceptual sound artist, in particular, has a quirky, vital pulse. Whether the earlier chapters have generated enough good will to let these later ones pay off depends on readers’ tolerance for traveling with these characters. Mileage may vary.
DOWN TIME | By Andrew Martin | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 285 pp. | $28
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