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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Chris Holmes and this is Burned by Books. Here you'll find interviews with writers you already love, like Jennifer Egan and Rebecca Mackay, mixed in with up and coming voices like Alexandra Kleeman and Roman Alam. You'll find us wherever you listen to podcasts, but check out previous episodes@burnedbybooks.com and on Instagram and Twitter BurnedByBooks. Let's start the show. Andrew Martin's downtime, his second novel after his New York Times Notable debut Early Work, introduces us to a web of characters, each of whom gets their chance to narrate the United States on the brink. And then, in the midst of the COVID pandemic in New York City, Cambridge, New Jersey's Ocean City, Cassandra, Aaron, Malcolm, and Antonia open up their private lives full of sex and regret, illness and resilience, and the impossible complications of living a meaningful life trapped inside our homes and our heads. Not so much a Covid novel as a story of friendships and intimacies that mutate and shift in extreme situations, but which retain the innate magnetic pull that keeps drawing each of them back into the fold. Downtime finds equal parts comedy and tragedy in the daily mistakes we make trying to intertwine our existence with others. And those face plants are illuminating in ways that feel revelatory and original. It's a sign of a novel's lasting nature when I cannot stop thinking about its characters as embodied people in my own network of friends and connections. I worried over Aaron's seeming death drive and Cassandra's codependency. Malcolm's insecurity and aching want for authority and direction felt as real as an itchy wool sweater that you would never give away. And Antonio's life among the underemployed idea makers felt as real to my own milieu as anything I've read. Recently written with what I now think can be called Andrew Martin's style, a comedic lightness in circumstances of human want and regret, Downtime comes at you with a force of the present, even as it tosses you back into a history that you might have well hallucinated. The insight and vision will not soon leave you alone. Andrew Martin is the author of the novel Early Work, a New York times notable book 2018, and the story collection Cool for America, long listed for the 2020 Story Prize. His essays and stories have appeared in the Paris Review, the New York Review of Books, and Harper's, as well as in the Yale review, the Atlantic, McSweeney's, the Times Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in New York City with his family. Welcome to Burn by Books.
- [03:10]
B
Andrew Martin oh, thank you so much. That was an extremely kind introduction.
- [03:16]
A
Well, I was a huge fan of Early Work, your debut, and I am similarly a huge fan of Downtime, and I was hoping we could start with you reading a little section of the opening, which is a it's a Cassandra section, and she's the narration is describing Aaron getting home from rehab. Would you read a little bit for us?
- [03:38]
B
Yeah, absolutely. All right. The day Aaron finished rehab, Cassandra picked him up and drove him to New York. Though they lived in Boston and the facility was farther north in New Hampshire, it seemed obvious to her that New England, and Boston in particular, was no place to celebrate. It was, after all, Boston. Though they would be returning soon enough, it seemed kinder to prolong the time away for as long as possible. New York, she knew, had its own triggers, even if Aaron claimed not to believe in the concept. But it was where they'd met and spent their first happy years together, and there was just so much more to do there. She hadn't considered the fact that it might not be a good idea to celebrate finishing rehab at all. I guess I might need to spend some time at a place again, he'd said two months earlier as she drove him home from the police station. He'd been picked up, wandering into the sparse traffic on Melnia Cass Boulevard at 3 in the morning. It would be his second time at a place in their seven years together. This made her sad and weary, but in the moment she couldn't quite summon anger. Aaron was smart and kind and endlessly curious when he was sober and a weeping pants pissing maniac when he got drunk. The pattern was well established. Weeks, sometimes months, spent as a productive citizen, writing, teaching, even drinking in sociable moderation were followed without clear provocation by violent jags of self debasement, then hospitalization or other intervention by private or municipal parties. In the past year, the cycles had gotten shorter and more intense. The inciting incident for this particular descent had been a neighbor's Hanukkah party, where he'd tripped headfirst into a bonfire and then rolled out of it with a drunkard's clowning grace, pants lightly charged, charred to general applause. He'd insisted on staying at the party long past the time Cassie wanted to leave, long past when good manners dictated. Their hosts, whom they barely knew, were accommodating, even amused, which she did not appreciate. Her exhaustion had eventually overridden her protective instincts, and she had left him there after he'd accepted his God knew how many shot from a large plaid shirted man whom Eren, she intuited, had resolved to out drink. She shouldn't have left. She knew that he did not make it home that night nor the next day. The cops found him on Sunday morning.
- [06:08]
A
Thank you so much. I'm a huge fan of novels that move or cycle between characters, experiences of things, but the really good ones are few and far between, and this is a really good one. And you, and you set yourself an extra hurdle and challenge by also moving between third and first person here. It seems to me the trick and the real difficulty is trying to preserve either the voice or the inner mentality or aura of the different characters as unique and distinct as you as you move between them. I wonder what your process was like trying to one, keep these really distinct and two, in having that move between third and first person.
- [07:00]
B
Well, it was all a real challenge.
- [07:04]
A
Yeah, I bet.
- [07:07]
B
I wish, I wish I had a simple answer and a simple methodology. And instead it was, it was really a matter of very slow work and very slow accumulation of material over time and then a long attempt at making it all fit together and making it feel cohesive. And so I think the way that it, for whatever one finds in it either authenticity or similarity or disparateness, the answer is that it was a very organic process. And maybe that's, that seems to be the only way I can do it. It was very much not by design. I think when I read books that move around between perspectives, sometimes you can feel this sort of itchiness in the author. Like, okay, now we gotta come back to this person, even though there's like nothing really to say here. And like we have a chapter where the character kind of just kills time because it's time to come back to that character. Whereas this, I really accumulated material and, you know, kind of wrote it almost like a short story collection, trying to capture moments of heightened emotion, moments of intensity, moments of conflict. And that became the design of the book. Once I realized that was okay, I'm only going to basically check in on these characters when there's really something important to happen, which is why the pacing is sort of unusual. Maybe, you know, it's not a regular, okay, we're going to check in every, you know, two months or something. And so I like the way, as I worked on it, I, I, I came to like the way that it, it feels a little bit disparate, a little bit heterogeneous in its style. And the first person versus third Question is the one that I have thought about the most because it is formally unusual and I think this was uncommon. It is.
- [09:16]
A
Especially for this kind of like, you know, multi character narrative system.
- [09:22]
B
Yeah, it is. And a friend of mine recently said, you know, I think it really disrupts the flow of the book. And I, my response was I think it does. And I think that's part of what I wanted it to do. I wanted it to, to have this sense of we're not just smoothly sitting in a roving third person. I think I love the modernists because I feel like they're playing the game in the early 20th century when there weren't these established rules yet about what a novel can do and how it's supposed to do it. And so I was, I'm. And I love early film for that reason, early silent film, because you just see them trying things that no one does anymore. You know, like, why don't we put the camera on a rope and like, swing it around in a circle and see what happens. And so I, I, I've developed the voice of Malcolm in first person. That's just the way it came out. And the rest were being developed in third. And for a while I was, you know, holding my head in my hands, thinking, I've got to find a way to transfer this to third. And then I thought, well, actually the, the style interests me, that disjunction interests me. The way that he's such a narcissist and sort of someone who, he thinks he's the star of every movie.
- [10:46]
A
He has main character syndrome big time.
- [10:49]
B
And so that was the, the other justification. And then there's something funny to me also about the fact that his biography shares the most elements with mine, even though there are a lot of things that are not the same. And so I kind of like playing with the idea that he's sort of narrating the whole thing in some, you know, kind of way.
- [11:12]
A
I hope you didn't have the, a similar experience to him in the college meetup with Cassandra in the, in the City because that was, I mean, that's actually one of my favorite parts of the book. But it's also so, it's so cringe worthy and, you know, shows off his narcissism, but also is like such a, a great portrait of how emotionally dumb we are at that age.
- [11:39]
B
I think it really drew on all those feelings and it's like somehow an emotional composite of, I mean, I grew up in New Jersey. It's like an emotional composite of those trips into New York when you don't really understand the city yet and you're trying to. Someone tells you to meet them in a museum, and you're suddenly on the subway and you don't know where you're going, you don't know what you're doing every. You know, you're trying to find somewhere that'll serve you alcohol, and that's usually not a place that you'd want to be.
- [12:09]
A
Yeah, it's none of the good bars, right?
- [12:13]
B
Like the. The all you can drink white wine with your Chinese food place.
- [12:18]
A
Oh, yeah, that was. That was awesome.
- [12:20]
B
Interested in IDs? And so I was. It was sort of an emotional X ray of. Of that phase of life.
- [12:29]
A
You know, when. When you were reading this opening section, I was thinking about how much the. One of the fixtures of each section is that these characters are constantly going to misunderstand their most intimate loved ones in a way that really injures themselves as much as injures the loved ones. And I felt like you were telling at. At once a kind of universal story about especially young people's fixation on knowing the person that they're most intimate with, whether it's friend or lover, and then sort of failing in some giant way to understand them while also telling something that was. That's pretty historically contingent about a particular moment in which that becomes a flashpoint. And I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about misunderstandings and the failure to. To be able to truly know our most intimates.
- [13:30]
B
Well, they certainly misunderstand each other at great. At great length in this thing and
- [13:36]
A
to great, you know, sorrow and, you know, some bad outcomes.
- [13:42]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's. Right. Their tragedy. The tragedy of these characters is this. Is this combination of empathy and tunnel vision somehow. You know, I think they are very sensitive people, and they're sensitive to the sort of psychic vibrations of the world, and they are social people by nature, and yet they. They seem to. To really have these terrible blind spots when it comes to their romantic partners, especially, but also to themselves. You know, they. They. They misunderstand their own motives, I think sometimes willfully, often, you know, not. I think it's interesting, and I'm glad you. You feel like it has a universal quality because I found myself in the funny position of. Of. Of often, like, explaining the nature of millennial life. And I. Oh, no, I know. It's. And millennials, you know, like the dirtiest word in the history of generational analysis for some race, some reason. And every.
- [14:50]
A
I mean, every generation has to take their time in, in that particular vaudevillian, like, horror spotlight of being the worst. And it, and it's your time now, right?
- [15:03]
B
And I, you know, my, I don't know, catch me on the right day. And my, my favorite writers are F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Cheever, both of whom I think were extremely concerned with capturing the real minute specificity of the time that, that they lived in. And so to me it seems intuitive that if you're trying to capture the universal, if you're trying to capture the way people think, then you zoom in and you zoom in very closely on this, the social aspects, like sort of the details, the strangeness of how people conduct themselves at a party, how they conduct themselves when they are trying to be suave in the manner of their time. And so I, I've always been of the mind that there's no such thing as dating your work as long as the emotions are real, you know, and you're, you're tapping into something that is honest and genuine. I think if you tried to reverse engineer it, if I tried to reverse engineer it and say, like, well, what would a millennial do now? You know, it would have no purchase whatsoever. And they're incredibly specific to, you know, my milieu, honestly. And, and so I, I'm taking every little magpie detail of every story I've heard from anybody and, and throwing it in a blender and trying to, trying to make it feel as honest as possible.
- [16:34]
A
Was Downtime always the, the title? Because I love it and it works about 15 different ways. But I, I, I am interested if that, if you came to it secondarily.
- [16:46]
B
Well, the secret title for a long time was Lost Time, because I thought that had a million great resonances. And I was also, like some of the characters in the book, reading a lot of Proust over the pandemic years, broadly defined. And I love the title and I was told by people I trusted that I did not want to be. They're like, as much as we love your work, you don't want to be bringing in the Proust comparison, you know, like, that's probably not going to flatter you in the end. And, and in my head it was also, it was almost like a play on the habit we now have of reappropriating titles, you know, of which there have been many and very, some very well done ones, you know, like Elif Batuman's titles, of which I actually already did in my story collection. I called it Story Childhood, Boyhood Youth After a Tolstoy Novel, like, as sort of a play on ellipse titles, but I thought, oh, nice, nice. But Downtime has. I thought it ended up working well, and I think it works.
- [18:01]
A
I think it works really well. And I'm gonna say I think it works better than, than Lost Time, even though I understand why you would, you would, you would like that one. So I'm happy it ended up as Downtime, because I, I think Downtime works especially well for a couple of reasons. And, and one of them is, you know, so many of the characters in both main and secondary here are writers, and there's this, there's this crazy contradiction that the, that Covid and the Pandemic did with the writer's life, which is this idea that all at once, you have all the time to yourself you could ever want to have, but none of it is Downtime because there's this sense that you should always be writing and that this is, like, the chance you have to, like, absorb yourself in, in the worlds of your imagination. And that is contrasted with then Violet, the doctor who's actually working all the time and overseeing the mass death and sickness of the virus. So I wonder if you'd talk a little bit about what it means for the idea of work and creativity and how Downtime kind of disappeared in the Pandemic.
- [19:12]
B
It's true. It became, it became like a magnified version of the writer's dilemma. Right. Which, which is, which is that it feels as though you're. You're both always working and never working. You know, I, I, My work involves freelancing and fiction writing and, you know, teaching at any given time at one to three different places. And so, Right. You're, you're always kind of on. There's always something you could be doing. I mean, it's sort of the dilemma of this era, right, where we can never really get away from our inbox and all that. But it did feel especially acute during that time because on top of feeling like you were supposed to be getting something done, like using your, your time that was given to you by this, like, sort of, you know, bizarre curse we were under, everyone's work felt like it was also to sort of monitor the situation, you know.
- [20:15]
A
Yeah.
- [20:15]
B
You always had one foot in the public sphere, even though you couldn't physically be in the public sphere. You know, you always were. And, and I tried not to overdo it because we all remember it so well. And it became sort of a cliche, this idea of checking the case counts every day and, you know, checking to see what the latest advising on, you know, how close you were supposed to stand to somebody was, I have it briefly, but at a certain point it became so embedded in us that, that it was like sort of. We don't want to harp on that, but there was, there was real action happening. And I think this is something I've been thinking about as well. And I think like so much of the pandemic era, thinking has been transferred into our post pandemic life in ways that haven't been very well examined. Just the idea that, I don't know, like sort of in the, in the world of ideas, that we live in an increasingly disembodied space and that the, the question of social media and AI and the sort of ways that the world is being mediated through tech have become completely second nature to us. And people just accept that at face value that that is what the world is. And I think there is a really, like, an increasing lack of understanding of, like, what it means to be a human being in the world, including in spaces that are not terribly picturesque, you know, that don't end up on social media or something like that. And like, what it actually means to run around in a hospital, what it actually means to be in a waiting room, what it, what it means to be in a parking lot. I don't know, these, these, these places aren't going away, actually, no matter how much you want to talk about AI and everything else. And I think there's something important, and I'm being a little bit inarticulate, but I think there's like something so important in remembering what it's like to be a body in space and recording that. And I have a romantic side where I want to romanticize everything, but I also really have a. I don't know, because, like, Flaubert is one of my heroes. I think there's a, an obsession with, with just preserving facts, preserving reality, and doing it in a way that feels artful but also doesn't occlude it completely.
- [22:45]
A
It felt like Malcolm and Violet's, you know, BDSM sex kinks were about preserving the experience of being in a body at a time where Violet had to be out of body to be able to process or not process, but be able to work with all that death. And Malcolm, you know, just from being sort of captured in a space, needed to remember being in a body is, is that, you know, am I, am I on the right track?
- [23:17]
B
I mean, that's, that's really good reading. I don't, I don't I don't know that I consciously. I mean in the scene when they're, when they decide to elope, you know, and they're in this place and, and they meet this other couple who do seem to, you know, physically embody all of these things that they think about and talk about all the time. I do think that was the idea was, was moving them into this physical world through that. And so he sort of, it's always been on in his mind and now he sort of fully catches the bug of. Right. This kind of like dominant, submissive thing returns you to yourself or like forces you to, to recognize what's going on in your physical world though, in a way. I mean I, I think this is, there's, there's a really great Ellen Willis essay who gets name checked at some point in the book about like baroque versus classical sex. And she, she sort of makes the argument that, that something like the elaborate kink that's going on in this novel is, is baroque and that classical is, you know, like slightly, you know, the more old fashioned, you know, bodies in space. And that there's something that maybe there is something that is over intellectualizing about this baroque, this more baroque form of sex that isn't a way of making it slightly less embodied and more about the ideas around it than it is around the like kind of more animal nature of sex. And I think that's that, that I think about that essay and that distinction all the time. And I think it's like running through my work in some way that.
- [25:02]
A
That leads me to a question I have which is, you know, you've, you've got characters that are, are, are mostly pretty deeply intellectual and, and working in creative jobs or at least trying to, and meanwhile sort of doubting themselves profoundly, even at the level of like doubting their material existence. And they're to the point in which their intellects seem to be self defeating. And I sort of hate the anti intellectual idea of overthinking as a malaise. But in your conversation about baroque versus classical sex, I'm thinking, you know, might it apply here?
- [25:41]
B
Oh yeah, I, I think. Right. I also resent this idea. And you know, you're catching me late enough in sort of the novel cycle that I can gripe about the way my book's been characterized at times and gripe away. You will rarely find a description of anything I've written that doesn't include the phrase over educated. Um, and, and I was like, they've all been, I don't know, like educated. I don't know, but I think people. What they mean by that is they. They are overthinkers and they can't get out of their own way. To me, this is. This is closer to the human condition than. Than something that's like, so specific to them, you know.
- [26:26]
A
Yeah. Yeah.
- [26:26]
B
Because it certainly is true of most of the people that I love and. And spend my time with, some of whom a few of whom even aren't writers.
- [26:38]
A
Yeah, but.
- [26:40]
B
But I think there's. There's something that I've again, as a. As a. As a. I mean, which writer isn't a serious reader? But, but as someone who reads more old books than new books, I. I love being in the tradition of the. The overthinker, the tradition of the character in the book who doesn't quite understand that they're not in a book, but, you know, but therefore is, you know. And then the, the fun irony is, of course they are in a book, but, you know, he's starting with Cervantes and going on to Madame Bovary and, you know, Italis Fabo and on and on, you know, this, this history of the bookish person who thinks that that's the way the world is and then as a result, makes it the way the world is. I feel like these characters.
- [27:33]
A
Dostoevsky's Underground man.
- [27:36]
B
Yes, yes, yes.
- [27:37]
A
Or Notes from Underground.
- [27:39]
B
Exactly. And I think these are the people that have always spoken to me and, and have always. And then, and, and then I'm always fascinated by the fact that you can know that you're not supposed to do that till the cows come home. And yet you find yourself. If this is the. The air that you breathe as it is for me, you might find yourself embodying some of the worst characteristics of the literary characters that, you know, you're not supposed to imitate, but what else is there? Says, says your dumb brain.
- [28:11]
A
You know, I mean, you. You run around, I think, like one's existence is running around saying my. My brain is not going to be the boss of me and then entirely letting it be the boss for the whole time until the end. And that's the story. But, you know, it's one. One might think in the way I've described the book so far as that it's sullen or depressive in some way. And even though the characters are often depressed, the dialogue and writing is witty and full of comedic turns. You're constantly destroy. Deploying streams of pop and literary references from Coltrane and Great Expectations and Proust to Gwyneth Paltrow's. Head in a box. And you intermix them with the comedic absurdity of everyday life. There's the hilarious scene you were just describing. Malcolm and Violet meeting those two performance artists who turn their wedding into basically kind of an offshoot of their dominatrix performance art. And I found myself laughing at some of the bleakest moments. And I wonder what the appeal is for the comedic. Not as a solution to dark times, but something that always coexists with them.
- [29:32]
B
I think that's right. I mean, I think for me that's the funniest stuff is when you get into that total grimness. And I mean, right. Where's the comedy in anything besides the gravest life or death matters? And you know, I think it's definitely a coping mechanism of the characters and it's a coping mechanism that I have. I mean, I remember when Philip Roth died. You know, he's one of my favorite writers and it was pretty soon before my first novel came out. And what I said to my then girlfriend was, I was really hoping he was going to read my book. This is something that a Philip Roth character would probably think in their complete self absorption,
- [30:24]
A
you know, he might have enjoyed it.
- [30:29]
B
I think. Yeah, I had my. The fictional version of Laura say, well, maybe he read a galley. You know, you never know. But yeah, I mean, Beckett is, is a guiding light in my, in my life and writing. Maybe not.
- [30:45]
A
I don't know if that's a good idea.
- [30:49]
B
And, and as much like the Beckett, you know, I mean, his, his novels mean the world to me, but also just the Beckett Persona of this man who, who cannot stop finding the world completely existentially impossible. And yet is this, you know, like, beautiful man who, you know, achieved anything one could, could hope for as an artist. So I, and I think there's something like inherently funny about Beckett's pessimism and there's something inherently funny about my own pessimism in, in the world because. Because it is, it is ridiculous because all you need to do is get out of your own head for 10 minutes and see how beautiful the world is. But, you know, I, I've. I've certainly struggled to do that. So I, I like to give. I like to give the characters a little bit of that ridiculousness. But I also, yeah, my instinct in life is to try to find the joke, you know, in order to keep things from completely falling apart.
- [31:56]
A
The. The death of Sam in a cycling accident sets off a ripple through the connecting waters and tributaries of her friends and former lovers. And it made Me. Think of how much I loved the movie the Big Chill or even the incomparable Stand By Me. Were you thinking about particular literary or cinematic influences that have a central death that draws friends together when you were writing downtime?
- [32:25]
B
Well, I was almost worried about those forebears. The Big Chill in particular casts a very long shadow, I feel like. And things get compared to that. And so I was like, I gotta make it not too big chilly. They can't have them all get together and dance or something. And luckily, you know, they barely get to. To all spend time together. So.
- [32:51]
A
Yeah, Covid helps you solve that.
- [32:54]
B
Yeah, it's like what if. What if in the Big Chill, they all had to, like, kind of stay in their weird little couples and not get to have these revelations and such?
- [33:03]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:05]
B
No, I mean, I was. You know, honestly, that was drawing. Not that the character herself is nothing like this, but it was right before the pandemic that I learned that an old friend from high school had died in an. Actually, like a really horrible climbing accident. Oh, God. And it was. It was one of those. It was a real. I can't believe that happened. I can't believe that happened to someone that I, you know, knew really well and really intimately for a long time. And I don't know, it just like. It. It really. And then something about the way it was. It happened, I think, in February of 2020, and then it was completely subsumed by the sort of shadow that then casts over the rest of the world. And something about that scale, I think, is what set me off on that idea for the book. How this personal tragedy seems to sort of raise the curtain on a global tragedy and then is. Is sort of overshadowed by it, but also never fully processed as a result. And so I think that was kind of the core. The core idea of the book, in a way, was. Was thinking about that and. And then I. Yeah. Trying to sort of make that character a little bit more central to. To this particular group felt like the, you know, the sort of logistical problem that needed to be solved, but that was the emotional core of it.
- [34:43]
A
Well, Andrew, before I let you go, I'm wondering if you've been reading and loving anything recently that you might like to recommend to my audience.
- [34:53]
B
Yes. In fact, I just finished earlier today a really strange book that I loved called Love Story Black by William Demby, D E M B Y. And he's this amazing black writer who was publishing primarily in the 50s through 70s, and they've. The books have been reissued recently sort of under My radar. I had previously, you know, gone through library stacks to read some of his. His novel the Catacombs, which is incredible. And. And this one, I was in the store and was surprised to see that these books have been reissued. And they're sort of part of the. Exciting to me. Incredibly exciting to me. Sort of like slightly alternate black avant garde tradition that runs through Ishmael Reed, who wrote the introduction to this book. And there's this. There's this whole group of writers who I keep discovering who I think are just incredible. Bill Gunn, the novelist and filmmaker, is one of them. And that book, Fishtails by Nettie Jones, that was recently reissued.
- [36:03]
A
Oh, I saw that. I haven't read it, but it has a nice reissue.
- [36:07]
B
Yeah. And so this book is a sort of. It's a sort of scabrous burlesque, like, very proto Paul Beatty, in a way.
- [36:16]
A
Oh, fabulous.
- [36:17]
B
Yeah. This black professor is given an assignment, this is the 70s, by New Black Woman magazine, to interview this elderly vaudeville star who he's discovered is still alive. And so he goes and sets out to interview her and, you know, a sort of like, baroque series of grotesque misadventures ensues. And so it's not for the faint of heart. And I think maybe the reason he hasn't caught on in his reissues is that the stories are a little grotesque and a little bit offensive, maybe for our current times, but very, very funny and very dark. And I just love this book.
- [36:55]
A
So I'm. I'm into it.
- [36:57]
B
And another one that I. I picked up because there was a New York review piece about this writer a little while ago, and I hadn't heard of him, this art. Art history writer, Morgan Mice. M E I S and the book is called the Drunken Silenus. Silenus. I don't know. How do we say that? Greek classical name.
- [37:17]
A
I don't know.
- [37:19]
B
And it's all about this Rubens painting of this guy Silenus, who was apparently Dionysus teacher. And he was like this total drunk who was part of the Dionysian retinue and just stumbles along drunkenly with Dionysus and his crew. And so it's like a close reading of what this figure sort of means in the history of art. This character who is, like, doomed to stumble drunkenly through the world forever. And it's just a. It's a very funny, chatty, weird book. It kind of reminds me of like early Jeff Dyer, where he's close reading something in this very, like, funny, personable voice. So I. I Love that.
- [38:02]
A
Well, well, Dionysus gets. Gets its moment in downtime as well.
- [38:09]
B
Thought of that. Oh, my gosh.
- [38:10]
A
Yeah.
- [38:11]
B
Of course. I'm drawn to the subject, clearly.
- [38:14]
A
Yeah, clearly. I mean, I'm. I'm excited about the drunken Dionysian. That sounds perfect.
- [38:21]
B
Yeah. The painting that he writes about is. It is truly maybe the greatest portrait of, like, horrifying alcohol use you've ever seen.
- [38:33]
A
Oh, gosh. Wow. I'm going to check that out.
- [38:37]
B
Go ahead and Google the Drunken Silence by. By Rubens. You got a treat coming.
- [38:43]
A
Amazing. Well, these are great, Andrew. Thank you so much. And I want to just really recommend Downtime by Andrew Martin. It is both a novel very much of our time, but also one that speaks to just the nature of the way in which we understand our intertwining with those around us, loved ones and strangers alike. And it is written in a wonderfully comedic and lasting style. And it was just such a pleasure to get to talk to you about it.
- [39:17]
B
Andrew, thank you so much.
- [39:22]
A
Well, that's all for me for now. My thanks to Andrew Martin for coming on to talk about his latest novel, Downtime. You can find links to purchase Downtime and all of Andrew's recommended books at the website burnedbybooks.com there you'll find all of our previous episodes, links to buy a podcast T shirt, and ways to get in contact. As you listen, take a moment to rate the show on itunes, Spotify, and now YouTube or wherever you find your podcasts. Until next time, this has been burned by books.