I’ve written before about my frustration with literature that concentrates on describing the pandemic, as if seeking to record it for posterity or remind readers of what they went through. Many of these works seem to check the boxes of memory, going wide rather than deep. In fact, Down Time is the first novel I’ve encountered that vividly evokes the pre-vaccine months without falling into that trap. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Martin expressed bemusement that more authors weren’t digging into “the ambiguous etiquette surrounding almost any social activity, the intense emotions and acting out provoked by intimacy after these periods of isolation,” which he saw as “ripe for fictional use.” In Down Time, he deploys the strangeness of those months to highlight and exacerbate not only his characters’ obnoxious qualities but also their real individual woes.