Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it’s a major plot point.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:
As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they’ve trickled out. But she’s found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to “overcontrol the experience of the pandemic” by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn’t know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer’s impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But “fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,” Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what’s happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this.
Meyer notes that she hasn’t found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she’s hoping for is “a great novel of the mind,” one that “will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse” to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people’s psyches.
As I read Meyer’s essay, I remembered Sarah Moss’s The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England’s Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can’t get up. Moss leaves Kate’s perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an “interior” work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary.
For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, “people don’t die of dread.” Moss doesn’t exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control.
