Andrew Martin on the Post-Lockdown Period

In “Risk, Discipline,” your story in this week’s issue, Malcolm and Violet decide to get married. Malcolm, the narrator, is a writer, Violet a physician. It opens with Malcolm describing “a depression so deep” that it was as if “I was pretending to be myself.” How do you approach writing a narrator unreliable enough to convey that dissociation but reliable enough to tell the story?

It’s tricky. I’m not too interested in writing an unreliable narrator in the tradition of Poe or Nabokov, some guy out here screaming that he’s not a murderer until he shows you the dead body on the last page. But I realize now that the beginning of this story does open up that possibility. I think Malcolm is unreliable only in the sense that he’s trapped in his own perspective and, partly as a result of his depression, not especially sensitive to the feelings of the other people around him (namely, the woman he’s marrying). I think the clarity and the self-awareness with which he recounts the crisis, though, indicates that he’s a fundamentally trustworthy narrator. I’ve also come to suspect that he’s being a little bit dramatic in his self-diagnosis.

It’s December, 2020, the first year of the pandemic, and, in New York, the marriage bureaus are closed, so they decide to go upstate for the wedding. What made you focus on this specific time, and how did it shape the story’s emotional trajectory?

Exceptional circumstances open up narrative possibilities. I eloped in scenic Hillsdale, New York, in December, 2020, and though my experience was free of catatonic despair, cocaine, and unexpected sexual power plays—it was, in fact, unambiguously lovely—the strangeness of the situation and all of the logistical details struck me as good fiction material. I feel like there hasn’t been enough written about the long muddle of the post-lockdown period, the ambiguous etiquette surrounding almost any social activity, the intense emotions and acting out provoked by intimacy after these periods of isolation. Memories of that time have a kind of ready-made dream logic to them—such as when Malcolm describes sitting in a friend’s apartment in his coat with all the windows open in November—that seemed ripe for fictional use.

Malcolm and Violet decide to invite a couple: Malcolm’s college friend Grant and Chelsea, an artist whose work is sexually transgressive. The dynamics between the two couples create a parallel structure that lets you explore different models of intimacy and control. How were you thinking about that?

As Chelsea suggests in the story, she and Grant represent an alternative relationship model that Malcolm is curious about, one in which sex and art-making are less private and inward-facing, and are instead treated more like a performance. Malcolm has an inchoate sense—heavily influenced, no doubt, by the spell cast by an attractive woman, drugs, and a gallon of booze—that his relationship with Violet lacks the honesty of Grant and Chelsea’s. It seems to him that they’ve found some kind of truth in their arrangement that he wants. I think there’s a lot of fantasy or wishful thinking mixed in with this realization, the natural human tendency to imagine other people have figured out something that you’ve struggled with. Whatever the solution, the night with this other couple reveals a fundamental truth for Malcolm and Violet: something in their life needs to change.

This story makes up part of your new novel, “Down Time,” which will be published in March. How does the story fit into the larger narrative of the book?

This story is drawn from one of the novel’s three narrative threads. In addition to Malcolm and Violet, the book follows the tribulations of another couple, Aaron and Cassandra, and a professor named Antonia, all of whom are connected through friendships and romantic history. They’re all wrestling with the hard questions of their thirties: whether to commit to long-term relationships, how to manage sobriety (or at least less-catastrophic substance use), whether to forge ahead in difficult industries (writing, medicine, academia) or compromise their ambitions. In the case of Malcolm and Violet, this episode functions as a climax of one phase of their life together, and opens new horizons for them. What comes next is, like their life before marriage, alternately fraught and, despite their stated resistance to the concept, joyful. ♦