Fourteen Days, edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston and written by 36 authors under the auspices of the Authors Guild, is the first Covid 19 book I have read. Until now, I haven’t been able to read any of the books I’ve seen reviewed that take place during Covid lockdowns. What got me this time was, first, authors I trust to be thoughtful and original and, second, that this book uses a similar structure to one of the great plague novels of Western history, The Decameron. A Covid book in which the characters escape their circumstances through stories? I can get on board with that.
Superintenant of the very down at its heels Fernsby Arms apartment buildng, Yesse, discovered a refuge on the roof of the building. She has a couch. She has her cocktails. She has the quiet of not dealing with the tenants. But then the other tenants find out about the roof—to her great annoyance—and gather there for a change of scenery. After a few nights, they start to tell stories. The people who Yesse only knows from nicknames like Vinegar or Eurovision or Hello Kitty reveal their histories and thoughts to neighbors they worked so hard to ignore before the pandemic.
The stories are mostly melancholy but run the gamut from satirical looks at cancel culture to doomed love stories to tales of revenge. Even though so many authors contributed to this book, I honestly couldn’t tell where one started and another began. This book is astonishingly well edited. The only real hint that there are multiple authors is the way that this book feels like a large conversation about Covid, about relationships, about art—and so many other things. I’ve never read The Decameron (which makes a hilarious cameo in one of the stories), so I’m not sure how much Fourteen Days echoes Boccaccio’s work. I’ll leave that question to other reviewers.
Along with the parade of stories, the authors of Fourteen Days build an overarching narrative about what’s going on in and around the Fernsby Arms. That super-narrative packs a hell of an emotional wallop that I don’t want to spoil for other readers. I mention it because the power of this book’s conclusion is a major selling point, as if this amazing book needed any more. I know I will need to come back to in a few years, because I feel that a little more distance will help me be more open to all the things Fourteen Days has to say.