HIP BOOK REVIEW: Fourteen Days
Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Published by Chatto & Windus
REVIEW BY VIOLA VON HARRACH
Award winning author, Margaret Atwood, is the joint editor together with Douglas Preston of the much-hyped Covid novel, Fourteen Days. Don’t expect a ‘kerpow!’ moment though or much in the way of enlightenment.
A week into lockdown in New York, the residents of a dilapidated apartment block start to meet up on the roof each evening, six feet apart as per the rules, to applaud the health and uniformed services, and then against the backdrop of police and ambulance sirens, settle down to regaling each other with stories. As lockdown continues so a ritual evolves. Each tenant keeps to the same place on the roof, and each brings a stool, a chair, some a table, another a cocktail shaker, a glass of wine. But more than that, neighbours become acquainted, friends even, old rifts are healed, there are fallings out, fingers pointed, tenants never noticed before appear at random to tell a story, some just sit in the shadows and listen, and a mural started by one tenant is added to by others.
A COLLABORATION BETWEEN WORLD CLASS AUTHORS
All of this is documented by the newly-arrived just before lockdown caretaker, a young woman in her twenties, Yessie, also known by the number of the room that comes with her job, 1A. As the offspring of Romanian and American parents, she is not fully integrated either as the caretaker nor in the bigger America beyond the apartment block. She is also in search of her demented father who is unreachable in a care home. An outsider carefully logging the number of deaths taking place each day out there in New York. ‘Death is like the distant sound of thunder at a picnic,’ says the tenant known as Eurovision. Yessie also sits up at night transcribing each story from her phone to a log book on her desk. The action takes place between March 31 2020 and April 13 2020.
This novel was commissioned as a project by the Authors Guild of America to fund its charitable work. It is a collaboration between an impressive grouping of thirty-six well known, and mostly world class authors from the USA and Canada. Each has secretly written one of the stories. The book is divided up by days though somewhat confusingly, some days contain several stories. The book claims to be a publishing first but from the onset, it is obvious that the form of this novel is unwieldy. A mix of uneven stories loosely and not altogether successfully linked.
SOME GOOD STANDALONE YARNS
Fourteen Days is rather like an adult form of the party game ‘Consequences’ for a creative writing course. Instead of drawing, then folding the piece of paper and passing it on to the next person, this is the written word. The authors are not attributed by story but rather at the back of the book there is an alphabetical listing, by author, followed by the day of the story acknowledged in brackets. But isn’t a novel about plot and storyline?
The calibre of the writing is variable, but that has in part to do with the difference in style, writing technique, and stance of so many different authors. Bringing them together coherently was never going to be an easy edit. Nor was the imposition of stringing these stories together in the framework of fourteen days. Folded between the pages though are some good standalone yarns of ghosts and spirits, a gay adoption, death, love, both hopeless and requited, loneliness, poetry, familial relations and in a lighter vein, a story that involves, ‘the nuances of bonding rabbits.’ Outstanding contributions, include, not surprisingly, Margaret Atwood’s The Exterminator in Day 10. Other writers of note include Dave Eggers, Emma Donoghue (her contribution is the rabbit story), John Grisham and Celeste Ng.
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