SICK, SAD WORLD

What COVID did to fiction.

- KATY WALDMAN

In the early, self-improvement phase of the pandemic, people would some-times comment on the opportunities that lockdown presented for art and artists. They’d observe that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during plague times, or that Tony Kushner and Larry Kramer snatched inspiration from the AIDS crisis. It was the slenderest of silver linings, jumbled up with terror and frustration—the idea that COVID might, if nothing else, produce enduring fiction.

Were the “Lear” people right? Four years after the virus began its worldwide demolition tour, the efforts of contemporary scribes of pestilence have borne fruit. A heterogeneous body of literature now attempts to catch the import of the period from roughly March, 2020, to the end of 2021. Authors have written erudite tragicomedies (“Our Country Friends,” by Gary Shteyngart), gentle ghost stories (“The Sentence,” by Louise Erdrich), and shape-shifting compendiums of feeling and memory (“The Vulnerables,” by Sigrid Nunez). The books are intimate and domestic (“Day,” by Michael Cunningham), poetic and psychoanalytic (“August Blue,” by Deborah Levy), stricken and timid (“The Limits,” by Nell Freudenberger), stylized and swaggering (“Blue Ruin,” by Hari Kunzru).