“Fear, like the thought of dying, makes us feel alone, but the recognition that we are all experiencing a similar anguish draws us out of our loneliness,” Orhan Pamuk wrote while the world was in the grip of the pandemic. During lockdown, I turned to dystopian fiction to feed my own grim curiosity about disaster and survival and to feel less isolated during the first six long months of quarantine.
People around the globe sought relief in apocalyptic novels that mirrored our uncertain reality. Many turned to Stephen King’s 1978 doorstopper, The Stand, about a particularly lethal and rather disgusting influenza outbreak. Others revisited Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven, my top pick from 2014, which portrays art as a source of meaning, offering stability and endurance in a terrifying world. I buried myself in Bethany Clift’s darkly funny, unsettling Last One at the Party, one of the early forays into fiction about our very own plague.
Since then there’s been a flood of Covid narratives. Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence examined life in an indie bookstore amid the upheaval. Ali Smith’s Companion Piece connected a personal lockdown experience in the UK with historical plagues. Weike Wang’s Joan is Okay was a unique view through the eyes of an ICU doctor in New York City facing the pandemic and rising anti-Asian sentiment. Isabel Allende’s Violeta spanned a century, drawing parallels between the Spanish flu and Covid-19. In The Fell, Sarah Moss vividly portrayed the isolation and mental survival challenges of lockdown.
Now, a riveting if uneven literary experiment has brought together a collection of stories written by 36 US and Canadian writers from all genres, ranging in age from the 30s to mid-80s, and representing an extraordinary diversity of backgrounds.
Fourteen Days, set in a grubby New York apartment building on the Lower East Side, has a framed narrative: a found manuscript featuring an eccentric cast of neighbours who gather on the rooftop, first to cheer, bang pots or enjoy the sunset, then to share vivid tales during quarantine. It begins on March 31 2020 and ends two weeks later.
Each story is secretly written by different literary voices, some less well known, like Maria Hinojosa, De’Shawn Chares Winslow and Weike Wang, others by Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Emma Donoghue and the like. The collection is edited by Atwood and Douglas Preston, with the proceeds going to support the work of the Authors Guild Foundation, which went broke during lockdown.
In the tradition of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Thousand and One Nights, Fourteen Days is a story within a story, or rather many stories within stories. Being typical New Yorkers, the tenants at first want nothing to do with each other. “The truth is, in normal times, we wouldn’t give each other the time of day,” a character from 5B declares.
But then they break the lock on the door to the roof where they sit and fiddle with their phones, drink margaritas and smoke weed. They start talking to each other even though they have nothing in common, and then they start telling stories, all in the first person. These are not pandemic stories, but stories about lives, loves, losses, confessions of crime, of murder, stories about birth and death, about a ghost in the Alamo, and stories of war — all so that they don’t have to answer questions.
The building’s superintendent, Yessie, a young woman following in her father’s occupational footsteps, has the habit of recording conversations in bars when men hit on her. She begins recording each of the stories on her phone, and then goes back to her miserable basement apartment and transcribes them, adding her own acerbic commentary and descriptors.
She devises names for each of the storytellers, based on an oddity of their interests or behaviour, like Eurovision, Vinegar, Florida, Lady with the Rings, The Therapist, Tango, Blackbeard, and Hello Kitty. In one weird scene, the person telling the story takes on the form of a spider; others delve into magical realism and the surreal, all of which makes sense at the end of this poignant collection. Some may see the twist coming, but I did not.
The book is a beautiful ode to the people who couldn’t get away from the city when the pandemic hit and the more than 80,000 who died. It’s a dazzling collection that reveals how in times of terrible loss and suffering, humans resort to that most fundamental art of storytelling to bring them together and shelter them from the storm.
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