#3 Pandemic novels, in my opinion
and the writing pause
This weekend we put up Christmas lights in our kitchen and after a few pretty twinkly hours, they fell down. Twice.
The pandemic continues to impact on our lives - formally, through things like the Covid-19 enquiry here in the UK, and informally, in that at any given moment at least one of the dozen people I work with most closely at the University has the virus while at the same time a number of colleagues in my broader working life struggle with Long Covid. Not to mention friends and family.
In my novel-in-waiting* lockdowns are in the recent past but the pandemic continues to have an impact on Flo, the main character, although she doesn’t in fact know it and doesn’t think about it in that way. The novel is set in 2022 just a year after Flo graduated from uni. At the university where I work, we see the negative impact of the pandemic on our students who continue to feel the repercussions whether they were already at uni in 2020 or still at school. It’s as though they’ve glimpsed something dark and that darkness has made them fearful and anxious. And this plays out in the background of my novel-in-waiting*.
*technical term for the novel you are waiting for various people to read before you know whether it is ready to go out into the world
I don’t go looking for novels about the pandemic but they find me anyway. Last night I finished reading Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea which I loved - I know plenty of Strout devotees but I have not counted myself among them in the past. But this book is sweet and sad and plain and profound in all the best ways. Lucy Barton, who we’ve seen in previous Strout novels, is scooped up by her former husband at the very start of the pandemic, March 2020, and taken to live by the sea in Maine. That really is the sum total of the plot but the book, which is set during the year that follows, manages to conjure the fear, sadness, illness and death, the boredom, the incredulity, the longing and loneliness, and the terrible abyss we encountered, the gaping maw that was everything we didn’t know about the virus and how, when and if life would return to normal.
It’s a better novel than Ann Patchett’s new novel, Tom Lake, in my opinion (I can’t use that phrase without thinking of the judge in the stellar tv series The Good Wife who insists that none of the lawyers say anything in her courtroom without adding the caveat ‘in my opinion’). I am a Patchett devotee despite or because of the way I sometimes find her novels scratchy and itchy. Tom Lake is also set in the US during the pandemic but this time instead of the virus and the terrible politics of that time - Strout’s brief novel manages to touch upon the murder of George Floyd, the Black Lives Matter protests, the US election, and the raid on the Capital that followed it - Patchett’s novel retreats from all of that and focusses on the pleasure that the main character takes from having her three adult daughters living at home where they provide a captive audience for her stories about the past. This is pandemic as plot device and it doesn’t work, in my opinion.
Have you read any recent novels that reflect on the pandemic in useful or interesting ways?
The novel-in-waiting state is a parlous one, and likely to be the primary motivation for me embarking on this newsletter. I’m attempting to stay upbeat. I’m also on week five of a beginner’s strength training course. This is not a metaphor. I have terrible balance, also not a metaphor. Ha!
Thanks for reading.