Martin uses his gifts as a prose stylist to get readers to remain with these aggravating protagonists long enough to develop sympathy for them ... Sharp, off-kilter, and particular ... The novel isn’t just a realistic chronicle of the pandemic ... It explores its characters’ reluctance to grow ... Martin writes tenderly and observantly about the obtuse, callous people he has created ... Of all the ways that novelists can tackle COVID, writing juvenile and self-absorbed characters isn’t the one I would have expected to like. As an ardent Seinfeld fan, I should have known better.
Keenly observed and fitfully propulsive ... In populating this world almost entirely with articulate, introverted, earnest-even-when-ironic East Coast types, Martin risks a novel weighed down with commentary, not to mention one in which the stakes...wash out somewhat. It’s not that the characters are hermetic, exactly, but they are monocultural, which means that the whole sometimes feels like less than the sum of its parts ... Generally, the secondary characters deepen and complicate the world more successfully than the primary ones ... The doubts are largely unwarranted, at least as far as the prose is concerned. It is good throughout, and often far better than that. The author sees the world sharply ... But the characters and the structure do not always rise to the level of the writing.
Talky, literate, and funny ... [An] intoxicated fade to black is a promising end to the first section, so it’s a shame that the rest of the book is less absorbing. As the pandemic advances, the characters lock down in various ways, disoriented and stressed out. Their anxieties take over the page ... A lot of Martin’s light-touch meanness is drowned out by his insistence on describing his characters within the context of early COVID — pulling out those masks from the closet ... Unfortunately, rather than overheard gossip, much of the book reads like a transcript of a hundred conversations you might have had in late 2020 and probably never want to have again ... Especially because the historicization does something to Martin’s writing, tossing in a saccharine element that neutralizes some of his humor. His first novel was tender toward its characters, but it never stopped making fun of them. Here, everyone gets a little too much sympathy — and tragedy.
What keeps Down Time from feeling like a retread is a new awareness of the wider world ... Don’t feel bad about enjoying Down Time, despite its often bleak outlook. The pleasure of this book comes from reading perfectly rendered sentence after perfectly rendered sentence. They’re hilarious sentences too.
The narrative feels a bit rangy for its 280 pages. I was left wanting more ... It is the characters that make this novel worth reading. Martin does construct some satisfying arcs, deftly instantiating the anxieties of a milieu (I won’t say 'of a generation') in the observantly rendered specifics of their lives. His knowing humor permeates the dialogue and narration so effectively as to make it almost compulsively readable. ... Though I ultimately wanted more from this story, if you’re a fan of Martin’s snappy, perceptive voice (and you really should be), then Down Time is, if not marriage material, a weekend fling you won’t regret.
Martin may be the greatest writer of the millennial generation writing about a particular (overeducated, white) slice of that generation ... The novel is frequently funny, a skewed comedy of manners, but it is also unsparing ... Martin brings an acuity to the moment-by-moment rendering of these characters that makes me care more about them than they seem to care about themselves.
Well-observed but listless ... Ambivalence and apathy reign ... Though stacked with witty observations, this novel, much like its cast, lacks direction.
