The Generation That Got Stuck in Lockdown

Antonia, for her part, does not have a partner. She spent her twenties married to the academic job market as a specialist in postcolonial eco-literature, and thanks to her efforts, she is now on the verge of securing a tenure-track position and publishing her second academic work. A hybrid work of cultural analysis, it argues “that climate change, as it is currently theorized, is part of a narrative of cultural collapse whose seeds could be found in texts and currents across the centuries… and that, paradoxically, this modeling was dangerously insufficient because it unconsciously lulled people into believing that the climate, too, would follow dialectical patterns, when in fact it was a totally alien ecological event to a historicizing analysis. » Downtime makes no commitment to whether we are meant to find this project jargon-ridiculous or prescient. But it is certainly ironic that, for all the time Antonia spends thinking about the end of the world, she is completely unprepared for at least one extinction event: the end of her ambitious career, which collides with the prolonged period of Covid-induced crisis in higher education.

For Malcolm, love and work are both problems. Although he lives with Violet, his girlfriend of five years, he tries to flirt with Antonia in one of the novel’s early chapters – a kind of casual infidelity in which he has clearly engaged more than once. A few years after the release of his classic detective novel, Malcolm also failed to write, let alone sell, a sequel. To earn some money amid his creative impasse, he agreed to teach a semester each year at a private Catholic college in Boston, where he travels once a week from his home in New York. But it is clear that he has neither passion nor real aptitude for the profession. He admits that it took him attending one of Antonia’s classes to realize that “the point was not for the professor to entertain, or a visiting friend of her age and sophistication, but to engage the students and teach them things” – a teaching principle so fundamental that it seems a miracle his students learned anything at all. Stuck, as he puts it, “between places, between what I previously thought of as discrete periods of my life,” he believes the virus will test his ability to get to the other side.

The novel oscillates between these four perspectives, covering a period of approximately two years. It is told primarily in the near third person, except for Malcolm’s sections, which are in the first. Certainly not a coincidence, Malcolm appears to share several biographical details with Martin himself, from his childhood in New Jersey to his fondness for the outsider artist James Castle, about whom Martin once wrote in The New York Review of Books. (Interestingly, although she is the focus of much of the action, Violet is the only significant character in Downtime of which we never have access to consciousness.)