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which the wealthy and privileged have quickly fled, and in whose streets and avenues the surging noise of humanity has been replaced by the wail of sirens bearing the sick and dying to rapidly filling hospitals.
Most strikingly, this is not the work of a single creator but of 36 writers marshalled by editors Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, who include John Grisham, Meg Wolitzer, Dave Eggers and Celeste Ng, as well as the editors themselves. The stories are both anonymous and not; a list at the end of the book will tell you who wrote what, but within the text itself, you will have no idea. I recommend adding the extra fillip of uncertainty and saving the surprise, even if it does lead to the occasional misidentification (I was certain a tale about a trip to Afghanistan in the 1970s was Atwood’s, because I knew she’d visited the country then; I was wrong).
The relentless grimness and precariousness of those early months of 2020 is everywhere apparent; the Fernsby Arms’s superintendent, a young woman maddeningly unable to make contact with her elderly father’s nursing home, keeps daily tabs on the dizzying rise in New York’s Covid cases and deaths, entering them in the spare blank pages of the vast ledger her predecessor has left behind. Also in his notes are details of the building’s inhabitants, their nicknames – “Florida”, “Hello Kitty”, “Vinegar”, “Amnesia” – recorded alongside a guide to their histories, foibles and intractable grudges against one another.
The residents at first gravitate towards the roof to take part in the nightly ritual of banging pots and pans to demonstrate their support for emergency responders and healthcare professionals; soon, they are bringing chairs and aperitifs and one of their number, “Eurovision”, a gay man devastated by the cancellation of that year’s competition, has established an informal salon. The price of entry is a story, which the curious super surreptitiously records on her phone and later transcribes into her big book.
Ghost narratives vie with tales of lost love, shaggy dog stories with the defiantly quotidian, gallows humour with the sweet and sentimental; and each of the residents’ stories reveal, whether they intend it or not, something about themselves. In this way, the book becomes a kind of jigsaw puzzle, which is itself reminiscent of that great novel of apartment life, Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, albeit in somewhat less experimental vein. An immensely enjoyable product of an immensely unenjoyable time, Fourteen Days is lively, freewheeling and, with its skilfully paced denouement – the super herself’s tale – an impressive achievement.
Fourteen Days: A Collaborative Novel is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
