Fourteen Days

Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston (Eds)

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, April 27th 2024

What first struck me about Fourteen Days, a collaborative novel produced by the American Authors Guild Foundation, was the literary “who’s who” of its contributors. Just as Wes Anderson populates his movies with his A-list amigos, Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston have enlisted the best and brightest of their friends and colleagues: John Gresham, Erica Jong, Dave Eggers, Charlie Jane Anders, and R. L. Stein to name just a few. And – spoiler alert – the ensemble performs beautifully, with nary a prima-donna among them.

Set in a crumbling New York apartment block at the height of the COVID pandemic, the story’s titular timeline covers the fortnight between March 31^st and April 13^th. Bored and frustrated by the lockdown, the tenants have begun gathering on the roof each evening to join in the daily 7pm cheer for the front-line workers before settling in for a socially-distanced hour of story-telling.

These impromptu salons, faithfully (if surreptitiously) recorded and transcribed by the apartment’s Super, Yessenia Grigorescu, slowly transform the residents from a collection of strangers to something closer to family a community as they share tales that whatever their tenor – factual, fictional, or apocryphal – reveal something true about their teller.

This multiple-narrative structure allows each of the novel’s thirty-six authors to feed their personal voices into the communal chorus recorded in Yessenia’s diary, her curatorial presence imposing structural cohesion and continuity. It also offers the opportunity for embellishment in her descriptions of her fellow apartment dwellers, whom she knows primarily through descriptive epithets, anecdotes, and cryptic verbal sketches in her predecessor’s journal: La Cocerina in 6C is ‘sous-chef to fallen angels’, while 3A is known as ‘Wurly, whose tears become notes’, and Prospero, 2E, a professor at NYU is ‘rapt in secret studies’.

The stories are as varied as their raconteurs, and, as with any collection, some are better than others. But the format also ensures that a less-than-satisfying experience will soon be compensated for by a more appealing offering. My two favourites are a sharp and poisonously funny letter written by a woman to her ex-husband and equally ex best friend commiserating about the disruption Covid has caused for their upcoming wedding, and the description of the cancellation of a couple who organise a literary plague-reading for focusing on white Western male canon. (The irony is lost on neither writer nor reader that the Decameron is condemned as sexist, racist, misogynistic, ableist, elitist, antisemitic, and homophobic).

There is also much fun to be had trying to guess each tale’s true author, although I would personally recommend not checking the attributions at the end; I was very disappointed to discover the one I liked the least was by a much-beloved writer.

Fourteen Days and other such COVID novels are also an important aide-de-memoir of the terrible events of 2020.  Just four years on, and already the soaring death tolls and the hallucinogenic quiet of lockdown feel more like a dream than reality. But they were also days of hope and community, qualities we need to hang on to, maybe more so now than ever.