Within weeks of the lockdown orders — days, even — there were think pieces. The writers among us were frighteningly eager to diagnose the neuroses that the Covid pandemic, which had only just begun, would inevitably cause. “Is That Nostalgia You’re Feeling?” asked an Atlantic headline dated April 1, 2020, referring to the cultural moment, about three weeks earlier, when things were still normal. Later that April, the New Yorker ran a series of dispatches from writers asking similar questions — Karen Russell on “How the Coronavirus Has Infected Our Vocabulary” and Maggie Nelson on “Finding Moments of Calm During a Pandemic.” By May, when the New York Times Magazine published its own interactive pandemic diary (including “You Can Be Homesick at Home” and “Quarantine was Driving Me Crazy — So I Decided to Lose My Mind on Purpose”), the conventions of writing about Covid were already calcifying. There must be hand-wringing about essential workers, elderly parents, and young children forced to attend school on Zoom. There must be gestures toward the friction between mental health and the civic responsibility to isolate. These articles were somber, mournful, but they almost always ended with a glimmer of hope — some sort of silver lining. Wildlife was resurging in the absence of humans! Sea levels were stabilizing!
Such was the cultural atmosphere in which the earliest pandemic novels were written. These books started to emerge in 2021, though the first efforts — the epilogue of a Sally Rooney dramedy, the final installment in Ali Smith’s quartet of novels set as close to the events described as possible — have a flippant, tacked-on quality to them, seemingly less interested in the pandemic in particular than the notion of writing about the present. The first major novel to dive wholeheartedly into lockdown as both subject matter and setting was 2021’s Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. A satire about a pod of out-of-touch artists and intellectuals isolating on a Hudson Valley estate, Our Country Friends could be thought of as the archetypal Covid novel. Shteyngart takes special care not only to hone in on the stuck-alone-together neuroses of pandemic life as the grounds for character drama, but also to situate that drama within a flurry of familiar imagery. There are awkward video chats and marital strife and summer days passed with long, aimless walks. Characters stock up on booze out of fear that “the state” might shut liquor stores down as “nonessential” and nervously eye Proud Boys-analogous locals flying Confederate flags that read “HERITAGE NOT HATE.” There’s the grim realization that not everyone is fortunate enough to afford such a rural getaway, that “people were dying in the city,” even while the pod is cooped up and bored.
As we emerged from lockdown and the details of pandemic life solidified into a shared memory, a source of chummy camaraderie and touchstones for the early 2020s, more pandemic novels followed: Joan is Okay by Weike Wang (2022), Lucy By the Sea by Elizabeth Strout (2022), The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez (2023), Day by Michael Cunningham (2023), Tom Lake by Ann Patchett (2023), August Blue by Deborah Levy (2023), Small Rain by Garth Greenwell (2024), Blue Ruin by Hari Kunzru (2024), Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood (2025), Down Time by Andrew Martin (2026), and Transcription by Ben Lerner (2026). Amazingly, Ali Smith managed a second, following up Summer with the aptly named Companion Piece (2022). And yet despite the range of styles and tones these novels offer — zany autofictions to paranoid thrillers to heartwarming mom books — the same signifiers of lockdown appear repeated. Ventilator numbers are fretted over, the Cuomo brothers chatter on TV, and the NBA plays in a bubble. International flights are grounded, then delayed, then cancelled altogether. (Though to my knowledge, no novelist has yet had the nerve to tackle the indignity of playing Among Us with coworkers.) Joan, in Joan is Okay, sees on the news that “all forty-two Apple stores in China had closed.” In Lucy by the Sea, Lucy only realizes how serious the situation in New York is once “Broadway had already closed its theaters.” Nunez’s autofictional avatar vows “not to be touched by the baking mania — so widespread it had created a flour shortage — no matter how tempting.” Kunzru’s protagonist delivers groceries on an app: “twenty brown paper sacks” to the doorsteps of bougie Hudson Valley estates. Images of deserted downtowns are fixated on. A character in Our Country Friends reports that “the virus was starting to make a dead zone of her section of Brooklyn, leaving nothing but ambulance wails and possibly suicidal trips to the bodega.” In Day, an exhausted Brooklyn mom emails her brother that “the hospitals are full, they don’t know what they’re going to do.” Jay, in Blue Ruin,leaves the city “like a cat slinking off to a private place to die.”
Surveying some of these novels in a 2024 New Yorker piece, Katy Waldman was unimpressed. She takes particular issue with the early pandemic novels’ “pummeling topicality, all sweaty masks and bottles of disinfectant, reverent about suffering and critical of the comfortable.” Lily Meyer, writing in the Atlantic in 2025, agrees. “Literature is a fundamentally reflective endeavor,” she writes, but “these books largely described what was happening, rather than thinking about it long enough to turn it into something different altogether.” Novels that hinge on current events, these critics argue, run the risk of their particularities converging into a sort of Ur-narrative with predetermined scenes, cultural references, and emotional registers. In a 2026 New Republic piece, Jess Bergman takes this same critique one step further, to be about class. She asks, “How do you represent a crisis whose effects were both intimate and world-historical, and whose suffering was borne so unequally—but perhaps least of all by well-to-do writers ensconced in their Brooklyn brownstones?”
With only a few exceptions, these novels of isolating upstate and infidelity and fearing for the children are remarkably similar in concept and content to the earlier magazine fare. They’re stuck in the same representative mode, regurgitating the iconography of lockdown to the point of cliché. Lucy, who is in fact isolating by the sea, “worried about the ambulance workers, that they would all get sick, and the people working in the hospitals, too.” In Joan is Okay, a hospital issues a series of orders about how wards will adapt to the influx of patients, including that “in worst case scenarios atrium cafes would have to close.” In August Blue,the narrator reads “about a couple of drunks who had broken into the dispensers in a hospital in London” looking for the 70% alcoholic hand sanitizer being churned out by local distilleries. The protagonist of Tom Lake worries about her twentysomething daughter, an aspiring actress, spending her last days of college “reading plays in her childhood bedroom” without any auditions to look forward to. In Companion Piece, a character shrugs off the smell of a fire in her flat: “a lot of people are having weird olfactory sensations right now.”
For the novelist, an aesthetic approach that hinges on such imagery as shorthand for a shared experience of history isn’t totally useless. At their best, these books offer sharp observations of the recent past, channel the linguistic and behavioral quirks of lockdown, and function as sly commentaries on the always-flawed act of remembering. More often, though, they feel like the literary equivalent of watching your 18th Marvel movie: the story is so familiar it feels like a reflex, and easter eggs and scraps of fan service are all that keep you engaged. They offer didactic lessons about shared humanity and a bizarrely aspirational undertone. In Joan is Okay, the doctors “began holding phones and iPads up to the sick,” who had to lean close to virtually whisper their “I love you.” Lucy, in Lucy the Sea, is moved by a sign stuck in the window of a store: “We Are All In This Together.” The world is ending, these novels seem to ask, but what can we learn from it?
Today, more than half a decade after the peak of the pandemic, the answer may be “not much.” In novels such as Down Time, Will There Ever Be Another You, and Transcription, published in 2025 and 2026, any moral urgency about Covid has been replaced with ambivalence. In each of these books, the “logic” of lockdown — the rules which defined both real life and the early novels set during it, and the understanding that following such rules would be the key to beating the pandemic — has dissipated. There are still plenty of references to pop culture and other pandemic peculiarities: from the epidemic of “bedbugs in Paris” (Transcription) to DaBaby on an uncensored radio station rapping about needing “some isht with some bop in it” (Down Time) to the ominous omen that “the CEO of Texas Roadhouse killed himself” (Will There). But in these novels, as in real life, the pandemic was not just terrifying or life-affirming or inspiring or any feeling so simple as to be described in an adjective or two. Attempts at such easy narrativization have been re-rendered as cringe or naïve or both. “We worked and we worried and we walked,” remembers Down Time’snarrator Malcom, “we made and saved money by working all the time and not going anywhere and by investing in stocks that profited from the world’s pain.” “I’m sorry not to respond to your email,” the brain-fogged and euphorically unmoored narrator of Will There responds, to a work-related query, “but I live completely in the present.” Read in sequence after the first batch of Covid novels’ unimaginative toothlessness, these could be thought of as charting the breakdown of consensus over how to think about Covid in real time.
This ambivalence stands in marked contrast to some of the earliest Covid novels — like Lucy by the Sea and Day and The Vulnerables — which have what feels like an obligatory positivity to them, a conviction that the bleak, anti-social nature of pandemic life nonetheless proved something universal and affirming about humanity’s heart and heartiness. Despite their deference to the crisis’ severity and their piousness about suffering, these books feel oddly optimistic. They reproduce an intellectual, imaginative, and moral undercurrent which, revisited in 2026, feels anachronistic. They speak to a very 2020 sense of how many emotionally clung to the epidemiological policy of sacrificing individual mobility for the greater good. There was a sort of faith there that if everyone just followed the rules, Covid would resolve itself.
Of course, in the moment, such a consensus was essential for combating the pandemic at a public health and political level. Yet in hindsight, and within the context of fiction, it feels hokey — too simple of a read. Such an intellectually narrow, rules-oriented approach to self-policing pandemic behavior and discourse — as well as rendering those who resisted public health ordinances into the morally reprehensible opposition — makes these novels’ insights about Covid feel canned. This black-and-white thinking easily meshed with the era’s unforgiving impulse to draw moral lines in the sand about art and politics. To borrow the language of an earlier iteration of the culture war, there were clear expectations about what behavior was politically correct and what had to be condemned.
The earliest pandemic novels operate firmly within this rules-oriented status quo. Writers and their characters seem reassured at the prospect of being given what amounts to a ruleset for real life. In Joan is Okay, Joan buys a deadbolt for her apartment “mainly to prevent cross-contamination and unwanted visitors” and finds the sound of locking the world outside away “comforting.” As a doctor, Joan feels more confident at work: “Once I was in the hospital, I could relax and greet people, because here too I felt safe.” The autofictional narrator of Small Rain also finds a sort of peace in the hospital’s top-down system of rules. He checks himself into the ER for a problem with his heart during the thick of the first summer of Covid and is “engrossed by pain and also by a strange relief, the relief of being a patient, of being passive.” Finally, “for a while, there weren’t any decisions, other people would decide” — in fact, he “could relax in their not-yet deciding.” These moments get at the relief that lockdown offered anxious left-liberals: the permission to cede responsibility. If one of the defining psychological features of the late 2010s literary and popular culture was a reflexive anxiety about doing or saying or thinking the “wrong” thing, then Covid, as a prescriptive set of rules one must follow, was a boon. Public health and beating the pandemic became a grand narrative, a mission, a sense of order worth organizing one’s daily life around.
And so N95 masks and other forms of PPE devolve from actual objects with pandemic-combating utility into symbols, the basis for a comedy of manners in which characters’ lockdown behavior defines their moral stature. Small Rain’snarrator is torn between wanting to order a big box of masks and gloves online and his anxiety that “it would be irresponsible to take them away from hospitals and first responders.” In The Vulnerables, one of the protagonist’s friends scolds her for being too flippant about her outdoor, masked walks through the city’s mostly empty neighborhoods: “don’t be dumb, she said. You’re breaking the rules.” For the doctors in Joan is Okay, “the face shields were the most uncomfortable,” and so after their shifts hospital employees take turns passing each other aloe wipes. In August Blue, the teenage daughter of a rich Parisian family rips her mask off in frustration during a piano lesson: “‘I hate this fucking thing,’ she said, ‘it’s ruining my life.’”
Other signifiers of lockdown behavior, like social distancing and vaccinations, are treated with a similar reverence. A moral schematic emerges across novels: characters who comply are noble and righteous, characters who don’t are boorish and cruel, and there’s little patience or nuance for anyone who falls somewhere in between. Nunez’s narrator is accosted by a barista for reaching over a sneeze guard, but resists getting offended. Maybe, she thinks, for the barista, “being one of those people who had to go to work every day while others stayed safe at home was getting to him.” William, in Lucy By the Sea, reunites with a long-lost sister online but insists they meet up outdoors, on a campus quad, because “he was so Covid-averse he could not stay in her house.” In Day, Chessonly allows her ne’er-do-well baby daddy to see their son from outside her apartment’s living room window, “standing on a sidewalk waving with slightly desperate vigor.” In Companion Piece, a friendly orderly escorts the narrator and her elderly father into a makeshift hospital ward made out of a former storeroom and tells them it was their lucky day, “that someone just gone just been moved out of the storeroom” and they could have it to themselves. Our Country Friend’sprotagonist, Senderovsky, makes his friends sit in the back seat of his car. “For distancing purposes,” he explains apologetically. When he brings the guests home, his wife, Masha, begins grilling them about their pre-lockdown travel histories “like a Heathrow immigration officer.” Masha is irked by the responsibility that Senderofsky’s lack of care thrusts on to her. “They force me to be someone I’m not,” she thinks, “they mistake my caring for authoritarianism, and then I have no choice but to become Stalin in an apron. But what option do I have if I’m to keep these cretins from getting sick?”
Reading in 2026, it’s strange to encounter such didactic depictions of the dramas associated with social distancing. That writers working so proximate to the pandemic were sharply attuned to the minutiae of pandemic social rules is understandable. Yet ironically, the success of polite society’s self-policing consensus around pandemic precautions — that, after six years, we’ve functionally beaten Covid — makes the whole pandemic era feel remote and difficult to empathize with. And so, as a result, so many of these details that these novelists hone in on, the scorekeeping which seemed so important in the moment, now read as trite. They’re signifiers whose meanings have been negotiated and re-negotiated so many times that they’ve been drained of all their symbolic heft.
In contrast, newer novels, published at a further remove from lockdown itself, acknowledge the multiple motivating factors underlying social distancing, masking, and the other quirks of pandemic life: virtue signaling and overcompensated anxieties and justified concerns about super spreaders all mixed up at once. Down Time’s Antonia flees “the loneliness and anxiety of living alone in Cambridge” to isolate with her family on the Jersey Shore. Upon getting on her stepbrother Mike’s boat, she takes off her mask, then watches it get scooped up by the wind to “blow out to sea.” Antonia is far from a Covid skeptic — the book notes that it had been one of her “social masks” made of “imitation silk.” Implied in Antonia’s passivity as the mask goes overboard is her exhaustion with what has started to feel like obligatory vigilance — that, this far into the pandemic, the “moment she was inhabiting didn’t fill her with fear so much as a blank numbness.” Antonia’s fatigue here speaks to a mid-to-late pandemic hand-waving of distancing precautions: not outright malice, but desperation to be with others despite the risk. Such carelessness isn’t permissible, exactly, from a public health perspective. But Antonia is not evil, either. She’s human, and lonely. It’s hard to imagine earlier pandemic novels giving space and weight to that sort of distinction without devolving into obligatory condemnation. Contrast that with something like Lucy by the Sea, whose protagonist is a New Yorker isolating in a borrowed house in a coastal Maine village, silently keeping tabs on which of the locals refuse to wear masks, and whose reaction on receiving the vaccine is tears of joy: “I thought: I am free.” There’s an unearned certainty around masking and lockdown in early novels, like Lucy By The Sea, which Down Time pointedly rejects.
Similarly, in Transcription, Lerner’s protagonist is shaped by how he clings to Covid precautions well past the pandemic’s peak. The novel opens in 2023 with its unnamed protagonist on a train to Providence to interview his mentor, Thomas, for a magazine. He sits anxiously, looking at his “masked face in the glass.” Throughout Transcription, mentions of Covid and its associated precautions are hedged with this reflexive, self-conscious language, often with literal mirrors (the narrator snapping photos out of windows with his superimposed “masked reflection” layered over the image, or another character, Max, disassociating on a telehealth call, as if it’s his “reflection” in the front-facing camera of the FaceTime call learning about his father being intubated and not actually him. We understand something about Lerner’s narrator by the fact that, three years in, he worries about social distancing in train cars and hotel lobbies and his kneejerk reaction to hearing live music pouring out of a restaurant — the sound of the world coming back to life after lockdown — is to “briefly consider masking.” It’s an overcompensation, well-intentioned but ultimately avoidant, the rituals of an anxious man grasping for clear-cut rules where none remain.
The protagonist of Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You is the polar opposite of Lerner’s. She feels liberated rather than unmoored by the pandemic’s social upheaval. Early in lockdown, she’s sick for 48 days, and the ensuing isolation and brain fog untethers her from the continuity of her life before. Her old and new selves come to a head when she visits her father, a conservative Catholic priest, and sees how he has refused to acknowledge or adapt to the pandemic. “Before it was possible for people to not believe [in Covid],” the narrator’s father defiantly kept giving in-person Masses. Now, in the long tail of the pandemic, he has become totally dismissive of Covid even as a concept. Yet unlike earlier pandemic novels, in which portraying such a character would imply condemnation, Lockwood takes seriously the combination of Christian compassion and libertarian defiance motivating his actions. The narrator is stirred by her father’s commitment to his flock, “how alive he must have felt, saying those illegal masses,” driven by a sense of mission that’s not totally unlike the driving factors behind Covid precautions and yet, at the same time, within the moral schematic imposed by Covid, totally opposite. Her father describes the feeling as being “addicted to reality,” energized by the battle he’s found himself in against state officials trying to shut his church down. Lockwood’s narrator doesn’t exactly condone her father’s conspiratorial rhetoric, nor his facilitation of what are almost certainly super-spreader events. Yet she finds something almost godly in his “illegal” masses with their “doors flung open, so that anyone could walk in.” His unsanctioned congregation, then, is both in the (epidemiological) wrong and the (moral, compassionate) right. And Lockwood’s narrator — who over the course of the novel learns to be able to see beyond the binary, moralistic thinking of the rest of her social and professional set’s discourse around Covid — finds a grace that her old self would have lacked. She arrives at her father’s home “afraid of hearing a name from his lips” (hint: Trump), but ends up finding a version of him that, despite his slightly conspiracy-addled brain, “stood in front of us with a look of patient endurance on his face,” a humanity that the rest of her world lacks.
The compassion Lockwood’s narrator finds for her father’s congregation of maskless Midwestern churchgoers also distinguishes the book from the political shortsightedness that undermined early pandemic novels. In some of these, like The Vulnerables and Day,political dissenters are almost entirely absent. In other books, they do appear, but as politically salient stock characters — right-wingers on Instagram and TV (The Vulnerables, Lucy by the Sea), entitled suburbanites (Companion Piece, August Blue), and gun-toting conspiracists (Blue Ruin, Our Country Friends) — present to raise the novels’ stakes yet never meaningfully engaged with as characters with inner lives worth taking seriously. In Lucy by the Sea, the protagonists are bewildered by the January 6th insurrection they see on TV — “Lucy,” cries her ex-husband William, “there were Nazis there” — but they feel a (condescending) compassion for a Trump-supporting neighbor after working side by side in a soup kitchen. In Our Country Friends, a group of characters walking around a Hudson Valley town encounter a “country family, their faces glum and consumptive” who “glared at them hatefully, assuming them from the city.” A pair of entitled Zoomers barge into the protagonist’s house in Companion Piece, and when asked to mask, respond “absolutely not,” that they’ve got “nothing to hide.” A particularly noxious character in Blue Ruin pontificates about how Covid’s Wuhan wet market origin story was “total bullshit” and that “there’s a level four lab there.” That same character — caricaturing a certain type of libertarian Covid alarmist that doesn’t quite make sense in 2026 — carries “a military rifle, an AR-15 or something similar, one of those sinister mass-shooter weapons that are marketed to American men like motorcycles or small-batch whiskey.” When asked why he needs the weapon, the man explains it’s for “when naïve liberals demonstrate that they don’t have a lick of sense.” The token right-wingers of these novels read like mad-libs of textbook “bad guys” circa 2020 — armed and bearded with camo hats and all, either misinformed in an “aw shucks” American way or else sinister, wannabe oligarchs. It’s as if these novelists were so far removed from the stewing conservative resistance to Covid that the only way they could conceive of opposition is via caricature.
In contrast, newer novels are more clear-sighted about the revitalized right that emerged after lockdown — from the anti-woke to anti-vaxxers — and, crucially, recognize that elements of their discontent were felt by those within the consensus, too. In Transcription, the narrator’s neurotic focus on masking for his elderly mentor’s sake is almost immediately tempered by the mentor’s apparent unbotheredness about Covid. Rather than do the dance of social distancing, he’s more interested in telling stories about his boyhood memories of “Hitler’s voice” on the radio “rising and rising and rising,” of his granddaughter’s “trouble with eating,” and his upcoming one-way trip to the assisted suicide clinic Dignitas. Will There’s narrator’s chronic Covid-induced fogginess is mirrored — or, in the context of the novel, reversed — by her husband’s sudden acute illness and subsequent emergency surgery. She looks at her husband’s wound as he recovers and feels a relief about her newly clarified direction, similar to what, in earlier Covid novels, characters felt during lockdown. “You put me in charge of it,” she tells her husband, decisively, and finds herself energized by the sense of order that such a mission offers. In Down Time, Antonia never quite finds that compassion for the entitled beach town suburbanites she isolates alongside. Still, the novel as a whole is interested in sitting uncomfortably with her hypocrisies. It relishes skewering the self-righteousness Antonia feels about her pandemic compliance. Even if she is “thinking about genocide again” and “how everyone had forgotten about the migrants on the Mexico side of the border,” Antonia spends her Covid summer laying drunk on a beach, no different than the other (both sets of scare quotes mine) “privileged” people “isolating” alongside her.
This double-bind of hypocrisy and privilege is especially crucial to Down Time’sincisive depiction of the racial justice protests that exploded during Covid. Companion Piece’snarrator rages (in a parenthetical) about the London police force’s tendency to “coerce, attack, hurt, abuse, and murder” women who’d flagged them for help, and Lucy, watching the protests from her TV by the sea, cheers them on while urging her adult daughters attending them to be careful. But otherwise, George Floyd, and the specifics of the movement that took hold after his killing, are conspicuously absent from many of the early Covid novels. In contrast, Down Time’smiddle act, set in the summer of 2020, is explicitly about the protests: not just the movement’s energy but also the jaded ambivalence which quickly undermined its momentum. One of the central characters, Malcolm, is a mildly successful writer whose live-in girlfriend, Violet, is a doctor in an overstretched New York City hospital. Malcolm mainly wallows in the apartment, emasculated by Violet’s sense of purpose, which he lacks. And yet as rudderless as he is in the early pandemic, Malcolm finds himself energized by the explosion of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Brooklyn that summer. In an email to Antonia, Malcolm explains that he and an enormous group of neighbors “all go yell in front of the station for a while, and then follow the march wherever it’s going,” and that despite his pessimism about these sorts of things, he is genuinely moved by the protests’ momentum. And yet almost as quickly as the sense of mission arrives, it dissipates. Malcolm feels disillusioned by the way his fellow protesters seem to have let the pursuit devolve away from racial justice and toward general animosity with the powers-that-be. “Like this whole thing isn’t THIS cop’s fault,” he explains. It’s a feeling that he’s confident has more to do with people’s mindstates mid-Covid lockdown than any particular politics. He confides to Antonia that “it feels ugly to personalize what’s ultimately systemic.” After weeks with little progress to show, he’s lost faith in protest’s efficacy. “I definitely caught the spirit for a little while. It was impossible not to,” he explains. “But now, I don’t know, it feels like it’s becoming just another thing, a routine. I’m not sure it’s really doing anything.”
This rendering of protests as nobly intentioned but at least partially performative, combined with the speed with which Malcolm grows tired of them, is indicative of the political and cultural ambivalence that set in toward the end of lockdown and now shades any memory of that moment. The protests happened, stalled, and stopped. The sense of righteousness many felt in the summer of 2020 is now reduced to memory, a discrete moment in time. Hindsight makes the whole thing feel slightly unreal: “Did we really think that?” Malcolm may be arrogant and entitled, but he isn’t a right-wing culture warrior trying to undermine the cause. He is briefly, genuinely, inspired by the allure of pandemic-era protests’ righteousness. (Isolate for the safety of your neighbors! Celebrate our front-line health care workers! Get out on the streets — masked, of course — and march for change!) Yet enough time passes that the hope fades. The disoriented ambivalence that Malcolm feels isn’t exactly jaded — in a lot of ways, there’s something more earnest and vulnerable in him trying to get swept up in the energy of the moment but failing to maintain the momentum. Yet it’s a far cry from the affected clarity palpable in earlier Covid novels. Malcolm — personally and politically — is left to fumble around for meaning where none is obvious.
The newer novels’ openness to the idea that there is no clear-cut lesson to be learned from Covid makes the early pandemic novels’ ideologically-narrow need for a moral lesson — grasping around for a ruleset, for a “So what?”— feel flat in comparison. Those books feel almost like a coping mechanism. Their authors were scared, unmoored, and used their fiction as a staging ground for psychological parables, which did reflect some in-the-moment anxieties but are less relevant the further we get from lockdown. Their didacticism is infantilizing and uninteresting. They offer what is supposed to be a humanistic rallying cry, but it comes off as dogmatic and overly moralizing, with little capacity for nuance. Fiction depicting our fragmented world should take that uncertainty seriously, not apologize for it.
That Will There, Transcription, and Down Time each tease out the confluence of ambivalence, exhaustion, and over-compensative compliance that underscored pandemic life is compelling. Their characters’ lack of clarity about Covid and its consequences is, ironically, its own form of clear-sightedness. It speaks to a very contemporary feeling of unease about Covid and the recent past and what this ultimately says about where the culture is heading. As works of art, these novels push beyond the didactic scheme of right and wrong, of behavior being either allowable or condemnable, which made their predecessors feel trite. They mine the uncertainty of their subject matter and use it as bedrock, as the conceptual core, of the entire work. As novels, they reflect something essential about the psychological moment of their creation. But refreshingly, they don’t presume to have any answers.
Martin Dolan is a writer from upstate New York. His essays have appeared in The Baffler, The Point, and The Nation. His Substack is 24 Oysters and you can find more of his work online at dolanmartin.github.io.