Pandemic fiction: Virus stories pack fall season
Book lovers look forward to new works by high-profile authors
NEW YORK — Near the end of 2020, the pandemic had lasted long enough for author Jodi Picoult to try something that seemed unthinkable for novelists in its early stages — turn it into fiction.
“At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t even read, much less write. I didn’t have the focus,” says Picoult, who last November began the novel “Wish You Were Here.” The fall release is set in New York and the Galapagos during the first two months of the pandemic, March-May of last year.
“I couldn’t find myself in my own life; writing the book was therapeutic,” she added. “I finished a draft in February, very quickly. And the whole time it was going on, I was talking to friends of mine, telling them, ‘I don’t know if this is going to work.’ But I had very positive responses and feel that, unlike almost any other topic, I have written a book about this one experience that everyone on the planet has lived through.”
From wars to plagues to the Sept. 11 attacks, the literary response to historic tragedies has been a process of absorbing trauma — often beginning with poetry and nonfiction and, after months or years, expanding to narrative fiction. The pandemic has now lasted into a second fall season for publishing, and a growing number of authors, among them Picoult, Louise Erdrich, Gary Shteyngart and Hilma Wolitzer, have worked it into their latest books.
Shteyngart’s “Our Country Friends” features eight friends who gather in a remote house as the virus spreads, a storyline for which he drew upon Chekhov and other Russian writers, and upon Boccaccio’s 14th century classic “The Decameron.”
Erdrich’s “The Sentence,” her first since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Night Watchman,” centers on a Minneapolis bookstore in 2020 and the city’s multiple crises, from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd.
Wolitzer’s “The Great Escape” is a new story in her collection “Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket,” which includes a foreword by “Olive Kitteridge” author Elizabeth Strout. “The Great Escape” is the first work of short fiction in years by Wolitzer, known for such novels as “The Doctor’s Daughter” and “An Available Man.” The 91-year-old author lost her husband to the virus and drew upon her grief as she updated characters from previous stories, the married couple Howard and Paulette.
“I found it cathartic,” Wolitzer says. “I wrote it in a week and I couldn’t stop writing about it.
The images about what
had happened to us kept coming up and I felt like I had to use them.”
More new fiction
Fiction this fall will also include works from Jonathan Franzen, Sally Rooney, Lauren Groff, Colm Toibin and Strout, and from four of the past six winners of the fiction Pulitzer Prize: Erdrich, Richard Powers, Colson Whitehead and Anthony Doerr. “Silverview” is a posthumous release from John le Carre, who died last year. Gayl Jones’ “Palmares” is her first novel in more than 20 years, and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s “Chronicles From the Land of the Happiest People on Earth” is the Nigerian playwright’s
first novel in nearly 50 years.
Fiction also is expected from Percival Everett, Anita Kopacz, Atticus Lish and Amor Towles.
Poetry
Inaugural poet Amanda Gorman has the picture story “Change Sings” and the poetry collection “Call Us What We Carry” out this fall. Louise Glueck’s “Winter Recipes From the Collective” is her first poetry book since winning the Nobel Prize last year.
Memoirs
One of the fall’s most anticipated memoirs is Paul McCartney’s “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” a $79
double volume. Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide and former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s estranged wife, Huma Abedin, has written “Both/And,” and #MeToo pioneer Tarana Burke tells her story in “Unbound.”
Others with memoirs coming include Mel
Brooks, Katie Couric, Jamie Foxx, Dave Grohl and basketball great Dwyane Wade.
History
Debate over the meaning of the country’s founding continues with works by Pulitzer winners Gordon Wood and Joseph Ellis, along with Woody Holton’s 700-page “Liberty Is Sweet: The Hidden History of the American Revolution,” endorsed by Wood and by an author he has otherwise disagreed with, “1619 Project” creator Nikole Hannah-Jones.
A book-length edition of the “1619 Project” expands upon the Pulitzer-winning New York Times report that, by placing slavery at the center of the American narrative, has been either celebrated as a needed corrective to traditional history or condemned as unpatriotic, to the point of being banned from some schools.
Hannah-Jones quotes from Holton in the “1619 Project” book, which includes essays, poems and fiction, with Jesmyn Ward, Terry McMillan, Terrance Hayes and Jason Reynolds among the contributors.