Book: Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel
Author: Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston
Publisher: HarperCollins, 2024
The novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic was a unique experience for the world. And where there are unique experiences, there are stories, or at least the makings of some intriguing stories.
The varying experiences, as told by major contemporary literary figures, have been compiled into 'Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel.'
Consisting of short stories set at the beginning of the Covid pandemic in a Lower East Side apartment block, each chapter of the book has been secretly written by a major literary giant, ranging from the likes of Margaret Atwood and Celeste Ng to John Grisham and Tommy Orange with a total of over 30 authors contributing. The book offers no table of contents at the beginning, and the chapters, which you are supposed to stumble through, are not arranged in chronological order. To determine who has written a particular story, you must carefully delve through the back pages. It's akin to piecing together a jigsaw puzzle. If you really want to know who has written which story, you'll have to do some work. But that part can be enjoyable.
I, however, failed to understand why the stories were so poorly written since the authors are all so well-known. They were sometimes unbelievable, usually overdone, verbose, and pretentious to a fault. Often, I missed the experience of the pandemic the most. Some stories were about old ghosts haunting museums, others about valuing the items of estates of the filthy rich while they lay dying on vents, a story about a serial rapist being killed by a victim's partner, a story about a nun who could smell death and then a story about an African-American man becoming rich by producing sauces told by his heiress daughter – just to name a few.
As the African-American heiress explains what her father told her after discovering that her uncle was a drug dealer: "'Forgive those who trespass against you as you wish to be forgiven.' Then he reminded me of all the sweet afternoons we had spent together, with Lafayette and Daddy telling what Daddy now explained were not 'war stories' but 'love-in-the-middle-of-war-stories,' as they took turns dancing around the living room with me to T-bone Walker and Billie Holidays and Big Mabel, to Big Mama Thornton and Aretha Franklin, to Sam and Dave and Jackie Wilson." And what the woman nicknamed Tango says can be summarised about the book: "I came to thank you all for your stories. They've taught me so much! I never knew about the one-armed pianist, or vengeance, or ghosts or the smell of death."
Sometimes, it was nearly unbearable to think that rather than writing simply, what all these great authors thought of as good writing was making it unreadable for the layman
'Fourteen Days' may be similar to Boccaccio's 'Decameron', the 14th-century compilation of stories told by a group of outlaws from the Black Death. In 'Decameron', the storytellers have escaped to the countryside, while in 'Fourteen Days', the rich of New York have fled to the Hamptons while the common people remained to regale us with their stories. No story seemed short of impossible, but to me, most seemed improbable. Some were more believable, such as a man replacing his wife with a mistress at a yearly friends' gathering without the knowledge of anyone attending. Some men are prone to younger versions of women as they age. In the tale, the most influential wife in the group mistrusted her husband as a result and left him, alone with his family. There were a few accounts of love and loss that touched my heart and were believable, to which I bobbed my head, saying, 'Ah yes, what a nice story!'.
Overall, reading the book was like getting through name-dropping and affectation. Sometimes, it was nearly unbearable to think that rather than writing simply, what all these great authors thought of as good writing was making it unreadable for the layman. I suppose such book projects are not written for the general public but are designed to keep 'the other' (which some of these authors themselves were at some point in their lives) out of the general discourse. And that is the sad reality of the literary world we inhabit.
The book's premise was perhaps the one thing I appreciated about the whole project: the idea of neighbours coming together as a collective with chairs and milk crates to a building's roof and there being a sense of community, sharing and discussion of ideas. That is what weaved the narrative of 'Fourteen Days' together as each neighbour took turns telling a story to their gathered audience, with each member having innovative nicknames such as 'Eurovision', 'Hello Kitty', 'Amnesia' and 'Vinegar'- in accordance with their traits. I loved the idea of strangers becoming friends during tough times. In each chapter, we were regaled with the Covid death toll of the day and Cuomo's handling of the situation in New York. The neighbours also applauded the work of doctors, nurses and paramedics by banging pots and pans daily.
The novel did make me relive the Covid pandemic, and I remembered a dark time when the world was all about social distancing, hand sanitisers and face masks, and everyone was scared of going outdoors. Reading it made me grateful we're no longer in a pandemic, and it is much safer to leave home. Sadly, as a piece of literature, as far as I'm concerned, it's not the best way to spend your time, and I wouldn't put 'Fourteen Days' on my online shopping cart if I were you.