Even our nimblest and most rococo flights of fantasy are rooted in the tiresome constraints of our everyday lives; indeed, the more mundane our immediate concerns, the more beguiling the world of make-believe. The stories we tell ourselves and one another are a tussle with time, a little fist shaken at a world of simultaneously alarming impermanence and grinding daily demands. So when the residents of the Fernsby Arms, a down-at-heel Manhattan apartment block, begin to gather on its roof in the early days of the pandemic, it is unsurprising that the yarns they spin are filled with as much death, separation and loss as diversion and entertainment; the stories’ tellers are killing time just as they are terrified that time will kill them.
Fourteen Days may take its cue from Boccaccio’s Decameron, the 14th-century compendium of stories ostensibly told by a group of fugitives from the Black Death, whose structure and ambition has been wildly influential, but there are marked differences. Notably, as this novel’s foreword from the Authors Guild Foundation notes, Boccaccio’s storytellers had escaped to the countryside; here, the principals are stuck in a city from which the wealthy and privileged have quickly fled, and in whose streets and avenues the surging noise of humanity has been replaced by the wail of sirens bearing the sick and dying to rapidly filling hospitals.
