A terribly funny and lovably louche novel about five friends growing older, if not always up, from Andrew Martin, author of Early Work and Cool for America.
Without Cassandra, Aaron would probably be dead. Fortunately, she won't leave him--despite the drinking, flirting, solipsism, armchair socialism, overspending, infidelity, catastrophic depression, and disparate but increasingly frequent spells of drug- and booze-addled debauchery. Unfortunately, she might be reaching the end of her rope.
Cass and Aaron, like the other neurotic, ambivalent intellectuals in their orbit, are getting older. There's Malcolm, with his own alcoholism and marginally more successful writing career; his partner, Violet, a doctor with little patience for both; Antonia, a teaching fellow whose book about ecocide may get her tenure at a prestigious university near Harvard Square--yes, that one. When Sam, a charming trust-fund punk at the center of this loose network, dies suddenly, and a global pandemic takes hold, all five must contend with the lives they've made: their desires and disappointments, habits and hang-ups, pathologies and addictions, and the possibilities of making art and being good as the earth whirls to its end.
Down Time marks the delightful return of Andrew Martin, the author of the pitch-perfect slacker classics Early Work and Cool for America. Compulsively readable and contagiously intelligent, this is a wryly comic social novel of settling down, selling out, growing up, and getting out that turns a terribly funny and hyper-literate eye on our most desperately guarded ambitions: to love and be loved, to know and be known, to stay sane, if only just.
About the Author :
Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York Times Notable book of 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, longlisted for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared frequently in The Paris Review, The New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, McSweeney's, The Times Book Review and elsewhere. He teaches in Brooklyn and New Hampshire, and lives in New York City with his family.
Review :
Advance Praise
"Moving and funny and gorgeously written. For all its aching sadness, Down Time is a thrill to read, the sentences somehow bold and vulnerable all at once. I'll say it: Martin has written The Corrections for his generation."
--Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams
"Down Time is a beautiful, weird, pervy, funny novel about everything that happens when it feels like nothing is happening. Andrew Martin has managed to capture the simultaneously absurd and moving nature of the present. So many moments made me laugh out loud while also thinking 'my god, this is so sad.' I loved this book!"
--Halle Butler, author of Banal Nightmare and The New Me
"Andrew Martin is a wildly gifted writer of relationships. He renders the quiet, daily parts of coexistence in a way that feels exciting, uncomfortable, and humane. Down Time is decadent, funny, and vivid about the way a relationship can be a strange shared consciousness."
--Raven Leilani, author of Luster
"Andrew Martin is a razor-sharp chronicler of the lives, loves, and disappointed longings of a generation hungry for meaning but forced to subsist on a diet of gigs and vibes. With rare skill and a superabundance of insight, he holds a wittier, more incisive mirror up to people like you and me and details the inner facets of their souls--and, most importantly, what happens when what's hidden is revealed to the people they hold close."
--Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun
"Down Time is effortlessly cool, wise, witty, and full of compassion--it should be blasted into space so that extraterrestrials, or our future descendants on Mars, know how privileged-but-adrift millennials lived and felt about being alive. Andrew Martin makes the exhaustion of our utterly fucked moment in history new, like it's something you could sharpen yourself against. This is his best book yet."
--Christine Smallwood, author of The Life of the Mind
