The Challenge of Writing About the Pandemic: A Call for Transformative Literature
The Limits of "Quick-Response Art"
In July 2020, just six months after the COVID-19 pandemic swept the world into lockdown, I reviewed three books about the coronavirus for The Atlantic. At the time, I referred to these works as "quick-response art," a label that reflected their hasty production and narrow focus. While the impulse to document such a seismic event is understandable, these books primarily described the pandemic rather than reflecting on it deeply. Literature, by its very nature, is a reflective art form, and these early works fell short of transforming the pandemic experience into something richer or more meaningful. Instead, they tried to impose control on an inherently uncontrollable situation, a common human impulse but one that often leads to shallow storytelling.
The Search for a Great Pandemic Novel
Over the past five years, I’ve continued to follow the emergence of pandemic-related literature, hoping to find a truly great COVID novel.Sadly, most of what I’ve read has struggled with the same issues as those early works. Some novels, like Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, attempt to moralize or satirize the pandemic but come up short. Others, such as Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea and Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay, descend into mundane descriptions of life during lockdown, sacrificing nuance for realism.Even celebrated authors like Deborah Levy and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie haven’t fully risen to the challenge, letting the virus linger in the background without fully exploring its transformative potential. As critic Katy Waldman notes, many of these works "regurgitate" the pandemic rather than illuminate it.
Escapism and the Limits of Autobiographical Fiction
While literary fiction has largely disappointed, other genres have thrived during the pandemic. Romance novels, with their guaranteed "Happily Ever After" endings, have become a popular escape from the anxieties of the real world. Even literary fiction has turned inward, with autobiographical novels that challenge readers to guess which details are true or which "bad boyfriend" might be modeled after someone in the author’s life. But this focus on the personal and the predictable comes at a cost. As scholar Anna Kornbluh argues in her 2024 book Immediacy, autobiographical fiction "deflates the power of writing to fabricate," leaving readers with little more than a reflection of the world they already know. What we need instead is literature that uses the pandemic as a catalyst for imagination, transforming confusion and uncertainty into theme or style.
The Promise of Social Novels
One form of storytelling that could rise to the occasion is the social novel, a genre born to help readers process—and protest against—overwhelming societal challenges. Classic examples include Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which exposed the horrors of slavery, and Les Misérables, which chronicled the struggles of the French poor. More recently, Adelle Waldman’s 2024 novel Help Wanted offers a polyvocal exploration of career instability, flipping between perspectives to convey the far-reaching impact of economic insecurity. A similar approach could be applied to the pandemic, particularly its pre-vaccine horrors. Imagine a novel that follows healthcare workers in an overwhelmed ER or teachers in a struggling public school, showing how their lives are forever altered by the crisis. Such a work would not only reflect the pandemic’s toll but also reveal its deeper societal implications—without shying away from the complexity and messiness of real life.
The Possibility of Interior Novels
Another exciting possibility is a novel of the mind, one that explores the psychological and emotional fallout of the pandemic. Works like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation offer compelling models for this kind of storytelling. While Mrs. Dalloway is often seen as an interior novel, it also captures the broader societal reverberations of World War I. Similarly, Moshfegh’s protagonist, who seeks to escape her life through sleep, offers a profound commentary on the national trauma of 9/11. A great pandemic novel of the mind could take a similar approach, rejecting the self-control that defines so much COVID fiction and instead embracing the chaos and unpredictability of life. One of the few COVID-related works I’ve admired is Chris Bachelder and Jenn Habel’s book-length poem Dayswork, which leans into intellectualism and oddity to create a unique and thought-provoking response to the pandemic.
The Transformative Power of Literature
Ultimately, the best pandemic literature will be the kind that surprises us, that takes risks and challenges our assumptions about the world and ourselves. It won’t be content to describe what happened or offer easy moral lessons; instead, it will transform the pandemic into something new, something that reflects the uncontrollable nature of life itself. This is what makes literature so powerful—it doesn’t just document reality but reshapes it, offering us new ways to think and feel about even the most traumatic events. As someone who still grapples with the sheer enormity of what happened during the pandemic, I’m holding out hope that one day, a brave novelist will step up to the challenge, helping us all to process—and maybe even begin to heal from—the collective trauma we’ve endured. Until then, I’ll keep reading, searching for that elusive but essential book that truly captures the spirit of this unprecedented time.
