LITERATURE
Erica Wagner finds out how literary greats from Margaret Atwood to Meg Wolitzer together wrote a captivating novel
IN THE THROES OF THE COVID PANDEMIC, MARGARET ATWOOD and the bestselling thriller writer Douglas Preston had an idea, both as a means of connecting their peers and to raise money for the Authors Guild Foundation, whose aim is to protect and sustain American literary culture. They decided to put together a collaborative novel in which each character, and their respective stories, are written by a different major author. Each submitted their contributions independently, in prose that Preston then ‘knitted’ into a structural frame.
The resulting book, Fourteen Days, is set in March 2020. The premise is that a group of New Yorkers have started to gather each evening on the rooftop of their building on the Lower East Side. At first, the neighbours cheer the frontline workers – as happened in cities around the world – but eventually they begin to exchange stories, to bridge both the social-political divides and the compulsory six-foot physical distances between them, with their words and their lives. Yessenia, the building’s young superintendent, encourages them and collates their tales, giving the tenants nicknames: Eurovision, Vinegar, Florida. Over the subsequent fortnight, they share fables from mytholog y and history, personal anecdotes, a story about Shakespeare, a tale involving a white Corvette – and lies. This multitude of narrative threads has been deftly woven by Preston into a satisfying whole.
Thirty-five literary voices, from John Grisham to Celeste Ng, Emma Donoghue and Meg Wolitzer, contributed to the book.
‘I wanted to be part of a collective,’ says Wolitzer, author of The Wife and The Female Persuasion, who casts a sharp and amusing eye over contemporary society and mores. ‘Being a writer is always solitary, but, of course, during Covid, it was even more so.
