Down Time
Keenly observed and fitfully propulsive ... In populating this world almost entirely with articulate, introverted, earnest-even-when-ironic East Coast types, Martin risks a novel weighed down with commentary, not to mention one in which the stakes...wash out somewhat. It’s not that the characters are hermetic, exactly, but they are monocultural, which means that the whole sometimes feels like less than the sum of its parts ... Generally, the secondary characters deepen and complicate the world more successfully than the primary ones ... The doubts are largely unwarranted, at least as far as the prose is concerned. It is good throughout, and often far better than that. The author sees the world sharply ... But the characters and the structure do not always rise to the level of the writing.
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Talky, literate, and funny ... [An] intoxicated fade to black is a promising end to the first section, so it’s a shame that the rest of the book is less absorbing. As the pandemic advances, the characters lock down in various ways, disoriented and stressed out. Their anxieties take over the page ... A lot of Martin’s light-touch meanness is drowned out by his insistence on describing his characters within the context of early COVID — pulling out those masks from the closet ... Unfortunately, rather than overheard gossip, much of the book reads like a transcript of a hundred conversations you might have had in late 2020 and probably never want to have again ... Especially because the historicization does something to Martin’s writing, tossing in a saccharine element that neutralizes some of his humor. His first novel was tender toward its characters, but it never stopped making fun of them. Here, everyone gets a little too much sympathy — and tragedy.
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What keeps Down Time from feeling like a retread is a new awareness of the wider world ... Don’t feel bad about enjoying Down Time, despite its often bleak outlook. The pleasure of this book comes from reading perfectly rendered sentence after perfectly rendered sentence. They’re hilarious sentences too.
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