Post-pandemic fiction could look different
The many novels that followed 9/11 might provide clues to future works
Someday soon, we will spot a review for a book about the pandemic spring of 2020. Already, the non-fiction accounts are on their way, with their chronicles of the virus’s spread across the globe and the missed opportunities to contain it. As the New York Times recently reported, Fang Fang’s Wuhan Diary arrived this month, with Debora Mackenzie’s COVID-19: The Pandemic that Never Should Have Happened not far behind.
The novels will come next. Speaking as a novelist, we depend upon journalists and historians to help us understand what really happened. Inside the fictional structures I build are the framing, wiring and plumbing that make a house a home, and a lot of what resides behind the fictional wallpaper is what actually happened. Or could happen.
In some ways, 9/11 is instructive. It was 2005 when the major 9/11 novels began to arrive. In that year we read Ian Mcewan’s Saturday and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. In 2006, Claire Messud gave us The Emperor’s Children, and Julia Glass published The Whole World Over. In 2007, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist arrived, as did Don Delillo’s Falling Man.
Obviously, there are others, and there were allusions to the cataclysm in novels as early as 2002 and 2003. But, generally, it took novelists more time to shape the nightmare into a story. After all, how do you make something up when the truth is so unspeakable? When the first of the World Trade Center towers pancaked into the earth on
Sept. 11, 2001, I was on the tarmac at Denver International Airport, seated in a plane that was about to fly to San Francisco. The jet never left the ground.
The first thing I did when I was home was change the ending of my forthcoming March 2002 novel. Instead of disappointment and grief, I ended it with uplift and hope.
The second thing I did was scrap the novel I was working on and begin a different story. It wasn’t about 9/11. None of us can really make sense of history as history is occurring. But 9/11 would figure in the story later on, and it was the first time I had set part of a book in Manhattan since my first novel in 1988.
Among the lengthy library shelf of 9/11 novels I’ve read, the one I think about most is Joseph O’neill’s Netherland from 2008, which chronicles (among other things), the demise of a marriage in the aftermath of the attack. But it’s also a love letter to New York City that captures the magic and strangeness of the metropolis: “Sometimes to walk in shaded parts of Manhattan is to be inserted into a Magritte: the street is night while the sky is day.”
The planet is starting to open up, though it’s unclear whether we will ever return precisely to the world we knew in February. Even when we have a vaccine, the things we took for granted — that Italian restaurant with the exquisite vodka sauce — may be gone.
If 9/11 is a literary precedent, it could be years before we will see our first rush of novels about the coronavirus pandemic. Some will no doubt take place in the innermost ring of Dante’s Inferno that has been New York City’s emergency rooms. Some will be about claustrophobia and the idea that hell really is other people. Or jigsaw puzzles.
But some will be about the joy of being 50-something parents and having your 20-something daughter and her boyfriend quarantined at home with you for months, cooking together and walking the woods of Vermont. My God, that has been a blessing for my wife and me.
When we began to shelter in place, the social networks were awash with the idea that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague quarantine. I’m not sure whether the point was to galvanize us or make us all just give up. But King Lear is not about the plague.
My next novel is not about COVID-19 — and neither is the book after that. I’ve used this pandemic spring to finish a novel set in 1662 and to work on one set in 1964.
But I’ve also been thinking a lot about something the Armenian novelist, journalist and professor Zabel Yesayan wrote a century ago about the tides of history: “We are very aware that we are in the middle of a war. But we are still continuing our calm and monotonous lives.”
The world has changed. We are brittle; we are confused; we are grieving. Those of us not on the front lines, those of us continuing our calm and monotonous lives, walk our dogs and bake bread. Some of us write. Just not about this. Not yet.
The Washington Post