Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston, Editors. Fourteen Days, A collaborative novel. Sugar Books/HarperCollins, 2024.
A bold project of the Guild of American Authors, thirty-six authors took part in this saga of two weeks during early Covid days in a shabby New York apartment building—a "decaying crapshack tenement" as one puts it. A brand new Super has arrived to inhabit apartment 1A of the Fernsby Arms just before the city shut down. She's happy to have a roof over her impoverished head, an absentee landlord, and a menial job, never mind the worry over her demented father far away in long-term care. 1A finds that her former job-holder, whom she dubs "Wilbur," had left her with a gratifying assortment of alcoholic beverages and the "Fernsby Bible": his confidential, pithy notes about the tenants! And he managed to privately nickname them; imagine the likes of Eurovision, Ramboz, Amnesia, Hello Kitty, Blackbeard, La Reina, Therapist, and on and on.
Speaking of roof, although access to theirs is forbidden, it quickly becomes an evening respite for many of the now sequestered inhabitants. Socially distancing, they eventually bringing their own personal comforts, when someone decides that we all have a story and even as strangers they might as well entertain themselves in the open air. Not everyone agrees, sticking to their phones because they can only get reception on the roof, but others take advantage of a more-or-less captive audience. Interjections and comments range from polite acknowledgement to sarcasm to outrage.
But here's what I want to know: Who glued it all together so seamlessly? Who animated the 1A Super as the narrative linchpin? Who melded all the disparate bickering, neurotic, gossipy, self-centred, emotional, repressed, or funny characters into a cohesive overarching story? Wow. I'd say Douglas Preston, as per the credits: "(Days 1-14 frame narrative)"
Participating authors, as per the appendix, have created people who are our neighbours. Us. It's a delicious poke bowl of humanity from all corners of life, with their opinions, their flaws, and their amusements. Together in the face of potential doom, they argue, insult, and occasionally admire. They do all seem to agree that their president is a supreme idiot; I didn't see anyone defending him.
Bits from 1A
▪ Wilbur must have been a champion procrastinaut, writing in this book instead of fixing leaky faucets and broken windows in this shithole of a building. (6)
▪ As the Super, it's my job—or so I assume—to make sure Covid doesn't get in here and kill the tenants at the Fernsby Arms. (9)
▪ So people got in the habit of gathering on the roof right before seven, and when the time rolled around, we all clapped and cheered from our rooftop along with the rest of the city, and we banged on pots and whistled. (10)
▪ When not paging through the bible, I kept it on the couch next to me, covered with a blanket. Today, everyone brought up refreshments, too—a bottle of wine, six-pack, thermos, cookies, crackers, cheese. (31)
▪ I worked so hard to be invisible, it was a shock to think they had opinions about me. (79)
▪ Eurovision arrived with his usual fanfare, bustling about, greeting everyone with ciao ciao, waving his hand this way and that, all energy, before taking his seat on the throne. (154)
▪ Most of us were half-shitfaced by this stage of the evening, and not a soul seemed to know how to follow that story. (226)
Bits from the Roof
▪ "Yes, I empathize with all the people who are losing loved ones and employment, even with 3C, whose fool son is always knocking on her door, first bumming her last crumbs off of her and then her settlement money, and I despise this fool president for his inaction, his sociopathic white supremacist, malignant narcissism." (35)
▪ "You been shit-talking me," Pumps said, her suburban Jersey Sopranos accent slicing the air, utterly at odds with her gloriously curated appearance. (47)
▪ "And if he wasn't married to Michelle, I know he would have asked me out to dance. Because oh, I love to dance. And the way Obama moves, it's clear he can dance. (50)
▪ "Who appointed you Den Mother?" said the Lady with the Rings. (70)
▪ "To hell with nice. Real life is mostly trauma and shock—so yeah, let's hear a mean ugly story right now." (144)
▪ "'American Pie' was muzak for privileged white hippies." (165)
▪ "I get a lot of my ideas from Hieronymus Bosch paintings. And fairy tales. If you think about it, computer games are like the new fairy tales." (178)
▪ "Oh yes, I do live in this building," she said, as if reading our thoughts. "But I specialize in not being noticed." (227)
Bits from Stories
▪ "She yanked it back so hard he lost his balance. Then she gave him a royal cussing-out so loud, he just lay there, like he'd been fire-hosed." (25)
▪ "Those bodyguards assumed that girl was no threat. Lafayette assumed that girl was pleasure without danger." (120)
▪ "Was it possible the grown-ups in charge didn't know what the hell they were doing?" (139)
▪ "He gushed language just like my daddy, splashing it all over me." (187)
▪ "People would talk about his drug addiction, but he only did cocaine so he would have more energy to drink, and he only stayed up all night to drink so he could stay up all night and write. He was fully in love with brown liquor." (187)
▪ "No, for you Americans, nothing should interfere with your right to party. To observe one of your sacred Capitalist holidays like Black Friday, a perfect image for your society, where, if you are not fast or greedy enough, you get trampled." (264)
▪ "Just like the original Decameron," he said. "The princes and princesses fled the city to a villa in the hills and told stories while half of Florence died with suppurating buboes." (269)
John Lawton. Moscow Exile. Ebook download from TPL. UK: Grove Press, 2023.
Subtitle: "A Joe Wilderness novel." If you get stuck on the meandering introduction you'll be asking what or who is this about? I seemed to be missing some mystique, some preordained info, that would unpuzzle the significance of the initial characters. Obviously a publisher's blurb had caught my attention in the first place, moi ignoring that the book is one in a series; in many cases not a problem with stand-alone strength, but this is an exception. The fact that some reviewers of Moscow Exile repeatedly call the book Moscow Blues is plain weird. Nonetheless, I soldiered on.
Charlotte Young seems to figure prominently: married to MP Hubert Mawer-Churchill but not for long; a distant cousin and favoured card-playing partner of Winston Churchill; second wife of wealthy American widower Avery Shumacher. Charlotte, known as Coky, knows how to fit right into Washington D.C. society. Avery's premature death left her well established in Georgetown; then, second wife of Senator Robert Redmaine, scourge of Hollywood, caricature of despised Joe McCarthy. Odd, how soon the name Pamela Harriman was buzzing relentlessly in my head although I barely knew her reputation. So that's the easy part.
It's a while until the role of upper crust political/military player Freddie Troy becomes clearer. He knew Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean who are in Moscow by now, shaming Brit intel services in the eyes and ears of the world. MI6 agent and playboy Charlie Leigh-Hunt is sent to replace Burgess in DC where the traitor had worked under Kim Philby. There, Charlie meets Charlotte and their true activities emerge in the deceitful world of London Rules. Combining fiction with real events is a tricky proposition. You had to know a little about the Cold War era. Me, I'm guessing triple agent at work in here somewhere.
Why did I find it so annoying and frustrating? Way too much unsaid. Espionage stories are supposed to be mysterious but this is ridiculous. Or maybe it's me completely out to lunch, considering the praise it apparently garnered. Reading the series from book one would seem to be useful, although even then I'm not convinced the author wouldn't obfuscate. Half this book goes by before the traitors cum conspirators are whisked to Moscow out of British reach. Half the book, again—before mystery man of the subtitle appears, related to some hostage exchange gone wrong and unintelligible debriefing. Then the context became murkier than ever and I tired of trying to find meaning in the ever-cryptic jumping from one elusive character to another. Stop torturing myself: the book was returned at that point. Are all Lawton's books as opaquely manic as this one?
Bits (as far as I got)
▪ "There will have to be changes," Churchill said, not looking at Cousin Hubert but at Charlotte. (19)
▪ "The opportunity is Washington—the hottest date imaginable. Diplomatic clover." (87)
▪ "But Kim is Lord High Panjandrum between us and the Americans. On Intelligence, I mean." (88)
▪ "We take Russian money to feed them practically useless information, garnered by a team of agents who don't actually exist." (93)
▪ "Can I see you again?"—a line so corny he'd never, in twenty-five years of unfettered promiscuity, uttered it. (98)
▪ "But they just poke around with a broom handle and call it the law, looking for reds under beds." (128)
▪ ... her dinner parties had been the stuff of legend—her soirees almost Parisian in their extravagance. (149)
▪ "I couldn't give a toss about Trotsky's permanent revolution or Stalin's socialism in one country. It's England I want to change." (179)
▪ "If we marry ... if we marry, we muddy everything. We attract the attention we've avoided for two years and we become ... a liability. Either side might take us out." (231)
▪ "Troys? Which one, that big bugger in parliament or the lunatic copper?" (241)
▪ It is a given that in a totalitarian state everyone is on the fiddle. (265)
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