Pandemic Pros(e): Books That Tackle Real and Imaginary Pandemics
Six years after the start of COVID quarantines in the U.S., senior editor Michael Woodson reflects on pandemic writing and its power in fiction.
Picture this: It’s mid-March 2020. My book club is meeting virtually to discuss There There by Tommy Orange. Our next meeting will be my pick. A few weeks earlier, right before statewide COVID shutdowns went into effect, I walked to the library from my office and perused the stacks to see if anything caught my eye. Something did. A hardcover doused in pink. Severance by Ling Ma, a debut I’d heard good things about, though I wasn’t familiar with its premise. But I was, naturally, judging the book by its cover, and the cover is very good. A pink slip for a book titled Severance. Clever.
“What’s it about?” someone asked after I announced it.
“Let me read the synopsis,” I said.
Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend.
OK, so far so good.
So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York.
Oh.
Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt.
Oh no.
Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost.
What have I done?
I suggested we pick something else, but everyone felt pretty confident that people would do their part in staying home and masking up and this ol’ COVID thing would be a blip in our spring.
Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
What were the odds: At the start of a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, I choose for book club a satirical novel about a pandemic. It felt like an omen.
I was suddenly dreading reading this book. Early-COVID did a number on my mental health, and I worried reading this book at the very start of quarantine would not be good for me. But what transpired was quite the opposite. I suddenly understood terminology I wouldn’t have known even a month before. I knew exactly the kinds of masks they were referring to, the actual concept of a quarantine, of streets suddenly emptied, of bad news piled onto more bad news. It didn’t make things worse—it made me feel, oddly enough, comforted.
Six years on, I’ve read many books that either include fictional pandemics, historical pandemics, or tackle the COVID pandemic specifically. Recently I read an article that suggested the “great COVID novel” hasn’t been written yet, that no author has been able to capture the moment quite right. I think this reveals more about a person’s individual experience with the pandemic than an author’s ability to write about something we all can understand, but it has got me thinking: What makes a good pandemic novel?
In trying to answer this question, I’m looking at a few books that incorporate pandemics (both COVID and otherwise) into their stories in different ways and for different purposes. And the obvious place to start is how COVID began for many of us: dread.
Building Tension and Creating Stakes
The early days of COVID in the U.S. were a ping pong of will-it-won’t-it. Endless news coverage of its spread in other areas of the world made it feel both far away and inevitable. The tension of everyday life was taut. The literal air we breathed felt thicker; I felt like my body was absorbing tension.
No matter what you’re writing, tension is critical to the success of your story. It’s what keeps your readers turning the page, even if that tension isn’t always explicit, and a traveling, widespread illness can inspire tension both in your fictional world at large and in the experiences of your characters.
In Arcadia by Lauren Groff, we follow main character Bit from his childhood and adolescent years on a commune in New York all the way through his own adulthood. The novel is told in four parts, the last of which reveals a “viral epidemic in Indonesia” that is slowly, possibly, making its way toward the lives of the characters we know.
What makes this so compelling is the sudden added tension in the last act of the novel. Bit has been through so much already—adolescence in the middle of a dying commune, the separation of his parents, being with and mysteriously losing the only other person he’s ever loved—that you dread the possibility of this invisible chaos reaching him at this moment in the story. The illness lingers in ways on the page that feel so familiar to us now, despite having been published originally in 2012.
Building tension this way requires a slow burn. Don’t overwhelm your reader with constant reminders of what’s building in the background. Offer enough information peppered throughout that the tension lives in the recesses as well as in the overt, and show it in ways that are both explicit and implicit. You can increase the tension as the possibility gets closer to the action, or you can release it should you decide it doesn’t quite reach your characters.
Revealing Character
Characters being in the midst of a pandemic can reveal new dimensions to who they are. I know for me, the experience of quarantining tested me. Aspects of my personality—how I try to plan for any possible outcome, being prepared for worst case scenarios (I’m an enneagram six, by the way)—came to the forefront, and while it added to my stress and anxiety, it helped me prioritize what mattered most to me and revealed my ability to create boundaries.
But everyone is different. Some people thrive on that preparedness; others struggle in the isolation. Author Ali Smith is the single-greatest author writing about things that are happening as they are happening—and in particular, the human, intrapersonal outcome of events. Her Seasonal Quartet was published between the years 2016-2020—the final book, Summer, incorporates the early days of COVID-19. The companion novel, aptly titled Companion Piece, is set in 2021, amidst the pandemic, and is largely about people’s need for human connection at a time when we were asked to stay apart. Among other things, it’s about main character, Sand, a middle-aged woman whose father is sick in the hospital, made complicated by COVID-19 hospital restrictions. It’s nonlinear, at time confusing and frustrating—much like the experience of living through COVID.
Day by Michael Cunningham follows one family on the day April 5 in the years 2019, 2020, and 2021. It precisely about the recent past and exemplifies how different people reacted to the pandemic and how individual decisions had the potential to cause irreparable damage. It’s also claustrophobic by design, taking place in just the family’s home, which also poses character opportunities. Do your characters feel safe and comforted by the fact that they must shelter in place, or are they bursting at the seams to get out—and if they act on that desire, what might happen?
Readers Can Relate
Whether your story takes place in 2020 or is about the Bubonic plague or is a completely fictionalized pandemic, now more than ever readers are going to bring their own lived experience to the page. This is both a good thing and a greater challenge for writers. You might feel an extra pressure to “get it right.” But I’m telling you right now, that is going to be impossible. To get it right for one reader will be getting it wrong for five other readers. So, simply, don’t listen to that voice in your head. If you’re writing about COVID, you have an experience with that yourself, so bring what you know to the pages. If you’re writing about a historical pandemic or epidemic, do proper research and read books that take place in those periods as well. (A few recommendations: Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell, The Weight of Ink by Rachel Kadish, and Company of Liars by Karen Maitland ). If you’re writing something dystopian or science fiction in nature, marry your experience with your greatest weapon: your imagination. (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel).
*Note: Not every book that incorporates a pandemic is automatically a pandemic novel. Read and study the difference between these distinctions so you can better understand how to incorporate them into your stories.
So, what makes a good pandemic novel? For me, it has everything to do with the purpose it serves in the story: if it’s for plot, character, or simply world-building. The concept of a pandemic is now tangible for virtually all of us, which makes their inclusion both more accessible to the reader, but also more challenging for the writer—all of us have our own unique pandemic experiences, and we won’t always see those reflected in the stories we read. To me, this is a good thing, for fiction is both a mirror and a window. There are any number of ways to write a pandemic novel that relate to your preferred genre and your writing sensibilities.
Take my experience reading Severance in the spring of 2020 as an example. I truly didn't think I could do it, or that I would ever be able to read stories that explored our lives during COVID. It was seemingly too triggering. It very well may be for you, too. I don't take that lightly. But COVID is something we all experienced, and history repeats itself when we pretend it didn't happen. For me, diving into pandemic fiction can sometimes give me a cold sweat, yes, but more often it reminds me of how the things that mattered most to me came into sharp focus: the health and happiness of my loved ones and imagining a better future. Sometimes darkness shines a light on simple truths that need remembering. Fiction has the power to do just that.
