Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
How to turn the pandemic — a period that mostly involved staying at home and not doing anything — into engrossing material is a challenge for authors. Scenes and plots can become repetitive. Confinement meant fewer interactions. And do we really want to read about Covid-19 when it’s still too close for comfort? Amid the glut of pandemic fiction, the best — Ali Smith’s Summer (2020), Sarah Moss’s The Fell (2021) — approach the virus as a springboard for commenting on wider political issues, or use it to focus on one person’s internal suffering.
Fourteen Days attempts to solve these problems in a different way: giving us a group of neighbours who gather, socially distanced, on the roof of their dilapidated apartment building every night to wait out Covid-19 by telling each other tales, Boccaccio-style.
Set in 2020, during the first lockdowns in New York City, this “multi-voiced novel” is in essence a collection of short stories, each written by an American or Canadian author. There are 36 contributors in total, including John Grisham, Celeste Ng and Emma Donoghue, and the collection is edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. Individual tales are woven into one overall story, with titles and who wrote what only revealed at the end. It makes for a rich melting pot of characters and genres, from a gay couple adopting a baby to a nun’s surreal ability to smell upcoming death.
Connecting them is the narrative of the building’s new superintendent, Yessie, authored by Preston. Something of a loser, she lives alone in the basement flat with a crippling secret. Instead of contributing to the group, she records everyone’s stories on her mobile phone, then transcribes them into the “Bible” — a binder of “research notes” on the tenants left behind by her predecessor.
Many of these tales contain strained relationships and moments of knife-edge existence. In a tale by C. J. Lyons, we hear of a “terrified, lonely, bored little boy” with polio hooked up to an iron lung. His doctors think he’s too far gone and want to switch off the machine; he’s unable to tell them not to. Another story, by Jennine Capó Crucet, follows the nuanced power play between two women thrust together on a group holiday in Maine. The bitter narrator deliberately refuses to make polite conversation, despite the other’s desperate attempts: “I’d never in my life had another woman want me to like her so much. The feeling was usually the other way around; that’s how I knew what it was.”
Explorations of deep-rooted prejudice and upturning assumptions are at the centre of the strongest. In “Jericho” by Alice Randall — which follows a black university student engaged to a famous white singer in the 1970s — the narrator is hassled at a petrol station in Mississippi by three drunk white men in a pick-up. They soon recognise who sits beside her: “Suddenly, it wasn’t some white man with some Black Girl. It was . . . the friend whose voice had been present at every intimate moment in their lives . . . They didn’t like it one bit”.
Later, in a story by Atwood, a young woman tells the neighbours that she used to be a spider. She now works as a bed-bug exterminator and the insects provide a “nutritional snack” in between her mythology classes at New York University (her own transformation is a riff on the ancient Greek tale of Arachne). Agile, sardonic lines permeate the prose. “It’s true that a few of us are severely toxic”, she says at one point. “But what group . . . wishes to be judged solely by its most alarming members? Are all human beings Caligulas and Countess Báthories?”
The collection’s impact lies in occasionally presenting atmospheric images that lodge in the mind. In “Remembering Bertha” by De’Shawn Charles Winslow, a musician recounts his great aunt’s funeral in North Carolina as a 10-year-old boy. Peering into the open casket, he notices that she’s wearing make-up: “I could no longer see where years of drinking had damaged her lips”.
Elsewhere, Fourteen Days barely skims the surface of emotional realism. Yessie’s worry about her father — who has dementia and lives in a nursing home — is described several times without variation, the words ringing more hollow on each iteration.
Readers looking for profound insights into humanity will not find them here. But the book serves as a valuable reminder that stories can teach, console, provide a place of acceptance and perhaps even change their readers (or listeners). Towards the end of “On Carnegie Lane” by Sylvia Day, a novelist discusses fiction that does female characters a disservice. Why limit their roles or make beauty their primary selling point, she asks. “The tales I invent . . . are crafted with the grace and respect we all deserve. That’s the power of imagination.”
Fourteen Days edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, Chatto & Windus £20, 384 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
