What happens when you ask 36 authors to write a novel together? The book, Fourteen Days, a project of the Authors Guild published in February – and edited by none other than Margaret Atwood, alongside Douglas Preston – is the result of a daunting, ambitious idea. It’s a daunting, ambitious book, too, so much so that one reviewer simply wouldn’t do it justice. So we assembled a panel of Globe writers to discuss – collaboratively – whether, in the case of Fourteen Days, many hands made light work – or if there were simply too many cooks in the kitchen. The discussion, which, took place by e-mail, is below.
From: Ian Brown
To: Prospective reviewers
My dear colleagues:
Apologies for being so late with the first foray in our proposed collaborative review of the recently published collaborative novel Fourteen Days (HarperCollins). I found it a bit of a slog, given that the “novel” was written by no fewer than 36 well-known North American writers (including Ishmael Reed, Meg Wolitzer, Scott Turow, Dave Eggers, Emma Donoghue, John Grisham and even Margaret Atwood, who is also listed as the book’s general editor). Multiple authors means multiple narrators telling multiple stories about an almost uncountable number of characters. I’m surprised they didn’t include an Excel spreadsheet.
Then of course there’s the setup. A collaborative novel can never just zip along: It needs a conceit to explain why it is being written collaboratively. Some are more convincing than others. One of the best was Finbar’s Hotel, published in 1999, a collaboration of seven superb Irish writers, each telling the tale of a different room in a Dublin hotel about to be demolished.
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers and readers share their book picks
In Fourteen Days, the storytellers are the tenants of a run-down New York apartment building who gather on its roof every evening to tell stories over the course of a two-week lockdown at the very outset of the pandemic. The tenants’ tales are secretly recorded by the building’s superintendent, who also provides the narrative preambles (written mostly by Douglas Preston, who has published 39 books of his own, among them the Pendergast thrillers). The manuscript allegedly found its way, unclaimed, into the lost property department of the New York Police Department, whence it came into the hands of the publisher.
There’s more setup in Fourteen Days than there is in a travelling circus, more voices than were heard in the Tower of Babel. Which is why the book is 353 pages long, and why (I admit) I frequently, er, rested between stories. Hence the delay.
I’m not saying it’s all bad. Because the tenants tell their stories to each other on the rooftop, most of the book is spoken “aloud,” as dialogue, which sometimes helps. Because the building is a run-down rat-trap on Manhattan’s lower east side, the voices are multicultural and frequently anti-establishment. (Ishmael Reed’s portrait of a gang of intellectuals who gather to read The Decameron – itself a famous collection of plague stories – is tart satire.) The book perfectly evokes the general terror of the early days of the pandemic, back when we washed our groceries: COVID was still so unknown that the distant prospect of 50,000 dead Americans is unthinkable to the roof dwellers. (To date 1.2 million Americans have died from the virus.). Emma Donoghue (who gave the world Room and The Wonder, among other bestsellers) tells the story, via a tenant known as Eurovision, of Nate and Jeremy, two gay men trying to adopt a baby; no surprise that her tale races along. But most of Fourteen Days is less memorable than I want a novel to be – especially if it’s making a claim to 353 pages worth of my attention.
Why do publishers keep trying these gimmicks?
Cheers,
Ian
P.S. Prospective reviewers are dropping out of this communal review like rats off the Titanic. But Douglas Preston had to wrangle content from 36 (very successful) writers. He is to be commended for his bravery.
From: Kasia Mychajlowycz
To: Ian Brown et al.
Hey Ian,
Can you say a book about the pandemic published in 2024 is too soon? Can we chalk up our reluctance to get through the book to that? I’ve yet to find a cultural artifact from this pandemic that’s made me want to do anything other than forget harder.
In the course of reading the novel, Ian, we bumped into each other and wondered what big twist the novel seemed to be building up to. I found it difficult to figure out which details were clues and which were just shorthand for remembering a character from a crowded cast, such as the nicknames for each tenant. Take the superintendent, who we know for most of the book as 1A, after her apartment number. She’s the most memorable character, and not just because we experience everything that happens through her eyes, so she gets more air-time than the others. When 1A finally tells her story to the rooftop crew, it’s shocking stuff. But early on, I couldn’t tell if it was important that I remember that she had a girlfriend in Vermont, or was born to Romanian parents, or worked at Red Lobster but got fired then got sick and went to the hospital.
I can’t say I was totally rewarded for keeping what I could in my head through this patchwork quilt made by 36 hands, though I hope it was rewarding as a charitable project for the Authors Guild Foundation.
Being an epistolary or “found document” novel doesn’t add much to Fourteen Days. For me, in the end I think it would’ve been wiser just to make it a first-person narrative. After my reading marathon was over, I went back to a few of the book’s stories. Unburdened of the expectation that the stories would hold together, I found more pleasure in rereading.
Sheepishly,
Kasia
From: Johanna Schneller
To: Whoever finds this e-mail
Because I’m married to the man(iac) who originated this group review, I got to watch him (not) read this book, and had to see for myself why. Now I have even more questions. The foreword tells us that the book’s (admirable) goal is to support the Authors Guild Foundation, which in turn supported writers who struggled in the pandemic, and also to fight library book bans. So, huzzah. But I wish Atwood and Preston had given us more info about how the writers were chosen and how the characters were divvied.
And I wish the writers had been given more (some?) direction. They call it a novel, after all, so I expected some cohesiveness, some forward momentum. At the very end there is a bit of a twist, so to not have some propulsion leading to that seemed like a cheat. Also, some of the stories (the best ones) sounded like they were being told aloud, in readable (if heightened) dialogue, while others felt like narratives that had quotation marks slapped on them in the final edit. I suspect Atwood and Preston were calling in favours, and they took whatever they got, and didn’t want to be too precious or churlish about it.
But … these are the best stories this impressive lot could conjure? I have this fantasy that every author has a few pages in a drawer somewhere that they know is something, which they can’t make into something more. I expected stories that were giddier, freer, more gripping than most of these.
I thought the most moving and best stories were the ones set in New York, which referenced New York life, before and during the pandemic. If you’re going to set a novel in the pandemic’s first two weeks in the city that by April 13 had, the book tells us, more cases than any other in the country, why not be a time capsule of those weeks? The moments in this book that made my heart stop – that made me feel – were the pandemic-specific ones: the guy pleading into his cellphone on the street, followed a moment later by sirens, then silence; the rumour of dead students at Columbia; the Malayan tiger at the Bronx zoo who tested positive; the ventilator shortages; the hospitals grimly set up on ships and in parks; the refrigerator trucks. That stuff is ghastly to recall, of course, and maybe it is too soon. But I think those are the stories – of tenacious U.S. citizens in dire straits, abandoned by their government because their politics were the wrong colour – we should and must remember.
From: Micah Toub
To: The (dwindling) collective of reviewers
Hey guys,
I was skeptical, too, about “a collaborative novel,” which sounds like a nightmare to produce. And I worried even more that it would resemble the “stories” that my high-school friends and I collaboratively wrote, high on coffee and other things, where you could only read the line written just before.
But I have to disagree with your mostly negative conclusions. I think Atwood and Preston made it work. And to my continuing surprise, I enjoyed almost every page of it.
Hidden within the prologue that outlines the collaborative process – “A Note from the Authors Guild Foundation” – is this line: “Since long before the invention of writing, we human beings have faced our gravest challenges by telling stories. When we are confronted with war, violence, terror – or a pandemic – we tell stories to sort things out and push back against a frightening and incomprehensible world.”
I’ll admit it’s a trite thought, so much so that its profundity almost disappears into the air. But I point it out because, for me, the book actually delivers on this grand promise.
There’s a strange little story in the book about a couple who get a second rabbit – I suppose so the first one will have some company. But instead of the two animals becoming friends, they try to kill each other. The young couple that owns them seeks advice from a rabbit therapist – how New York is that? – who suggests they put the rabbits into a box together, drive around and rotate the box upside down at regular intervals. Just as the bunny shrink predicted, the trauma of the ordeal bonds them, and they become Best Bunny Friends Forever.
And this central theme of coming together through trauma also rang true for me. Like the tenants of the book’s “crapshack tenement,” I often found myself during the early pandemic talking to people not of my choosing in order to continue having a social life of any kind. It turns out, for instance, that the guy I always greeted in the alleyway as we passed with our dogs is a full-on conspiracy theorist! Forced to talk with him, I found myself also forced to attempt to understand him, how he came to be the way he was. Isn’t that the kind of thing we could use more of these days?
While I’m on the metaphor, maybe there’s a silver lining for my less-enthusiastic collaborative reviewers. Whatever suffering you had to endure reading the book, it’s now a trauma you can share.
From: Ian Brown
To: Micah Toub
You are an optimist.
