![]() ![]() The task of the great pandemic novel, if such a thing were to exist, might be to start metabolizing the unprecedented disruptions caused by the COVID-19 response: the ideas internalized, vocabularies assimilated, risks assumed, sacrifices made. Already the pandemic has crept into some novels (Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You, Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends), but as a fact of the world rather than a moral and intellectual crisis to be reckoned with. There is a reason world-historical ruptures, like the one collectively experienced in the spring of 2020, tend to produce big, ambitious books. Saying the unsayable is not the job of political leaders it is, however, the province of great fiction. It was a statement outside the bounds of acceptable discourse, and the talking heads went wild. “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF,” then-president Donald Trump tweeted just days into the first work-from-home mandates. In March 2020, the New York Times told us it was only a matter of time, and now the wait is over: the first wave of pandemic fiction is upon us. No amount of cynicism will deter its spread. You can sneer or avoid it or pretend it doesn’t exist, but it won’t go away. The experts have been consulted, and the think pieces have urged us to prepare ourselves. $32.50.įor many months it’s been predicted, its arrival declared inevitable. ![]()
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