Andrew Martin’s New Novel Captures the Stagnation of Adulthood in the Pandemic Era

Andrew Martin’s protagonists are often overeducated and underemployed, clinging to creative aspirations while drowning in self-destruction. Whether it’s weed, tequila, whiskey, beer, or mushrooms fueling their misadventures, Martin’s characters—like Peter and Leslie in his 2018 debut Early Work—are more likely to chase fleeting ambitions than tangible achievements.

In his 2020 collection Cool for America, the unnamed narrator’s reckless affair with his friend’s wife unfolds through a haze of alcohol and painkillers, culminating in a violent confrontation. Youth excuses their dissipation, if not their choices. Martin’s early works chronicle friends and lovers in their early or mid-twenties, untethered from adult responsibilities like mortgages or parenthood, yet acutely aware of time slipping away.

Peter, reappearing in both Early Work and Cool for America, voices their collective dread in the story The Boy Vet: “I was waiting, I guess, for the unforeseen motivating force that would launch me screaming into my thirties. Please stop me if you’ve heard any of this before.”

Martin’s new novel, Down Time, confronts that force head-on. Its core quartet—Cassandra, Malcolm, Antonia, and Aaron—are a decade older than his youngest characters, teetering on the edge of middle age. Yet maturity doesn’t shield them from Martin’s signature themes: self-sabotage, fleeting relationships, and precarious stability.

The novel opens with familiar beats: a relapse, a risky kiss, a friends-with-benefits arrangement gone wrong. These patterns aren’t accidental. Like their younger counterparts, Down Time’s characters are trapped in cycles—addiction and sobriety, breakups and reconciliation, unstable jobs and elusive success. Aaron, an alcoholic, laments, “everything was always the same, the same, the same,” while Malcolm, struggling to write after his first book’s modest success, echoes the sentiment: “everything I did led me back to the same place.”

Then, January 2020 arrives—and with it, COVID-19. The pandemic doesn’t just amplify their stagnation; it violently disrupts it. The stasis Martin’s characters endure is no longer a personal failing but a shared, global crisis.