‘In the dark times / Will there also be singing?” muses Brecht in the Svendborg Poems. “Yes, there will also be singing / About the dark times.” The impulse for lamentation in a crisis is instinctive and, perhaps, socially useful. But how we voice a response to catastrophe can be contentious, not least with the recent Covid pandemic. And while it may be too early to judge the overall effect of the crisis on the written word, we seem to have come out of it with more of a feeling of discord than harmony, and a sense that the plague and its quarantine accelerated an already existing divisiveness and cultural dissonance.
So in many ways the publication of Fourteen Days could not have been more timely. Commissioned by the US Authors Guild Foundation, with proceeds going to support its charitable work, this is a collaborative novel set in New York at the start of lockdown, offering a collective narrative of that time and produced by 36 literary heavyweights from the US and Canada. Edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, there’s work here from an impressive list of writers, including Emma Donoghue, Ishmael Reed, Dave Eggers and Celeste Ng. The book is pitched as an “ode to the power of storytelling and human connection”, and the setting is an apartment building in Manhattan, where residents gather on the rooftop at twilight; socially distanced interactions develop as they begin telling tales. A shared sense of grief and isolation emerges and, as New York becomes the epicentre of the pandemic, the stories become “a reminder of what we’re losing, keeping people away from their loved ones as they die”.
