My Search for a Great Pandemic Novel

In July of 2020, a little less than six months after COVID-19 sent much of the world into lockdown, I reviewed three newly released books about the coronavirus pandemic for this magazine. Six months is short in many contexts, but in publishing, it’s no time at all. I referred to these speed-demon titles as “quick-response art,” and wasn’t impressed. Literature is a fundamentally reflective endeavor, and as I wrote then, these books largely described what was happening, rather than thinking about it long enough to turn it into something different altogether.

This impulse is, of course, understandable. Describing something is a way to feel as if you’re in control of it, a sensation many of us longed for in 2020. Yet fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation. The pre-vaccine period of the pandemic was a flagrantly uncontrollable situation, but even in much calmer situations, life is uncontrollable because it’s life. Something good or bad or neutral yet incomprehensible could change my existence at any moment: That’s the bargain of being human. Literature that doesn’t contain its own version of this deal—literature that tries to freeze-frame reality instead of transmuting it—is often boring, even alienating. Descriptive pandemic writing falls into precisely that trap.

[Read: The literature of the pandemic is already here]

I’ve continued to keep an eye on the literature of the pandemic as it emerges. I’ve read every COVID novel I’ve noticed coming out in the past five years, waiting for a truly great one, but so far, the ones I’ve read similarly overcontrol the experience of the pandemic. Some, such as Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables, seem to want to use it to teach a moral lesson. (Look, it says of the odd-couple roommates who are its protagonists: We can connect across our differences.) Others, like Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, try and fail to make light of it; his satire of liberal elites sheltering in the Hudson Valley came too soon and was too burdened by its characters’ guilt at the relative ease of their experience. (I admire Shteyngart’s and Nunez’s other novels greatly. My disappointment, on reading both these books, was immense.)

The most common type of novel, though, is the one that’s mundanely descriptive of Life During the Pandemic—stories that feel as if they’ve been dredged from the author’s memories of it. We see this in Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy by the Sea, a novel that rises above a dull COVID-description opening to become wonderful by its end, and in Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay, an intriguing character study of a socially inept doctor that descends into COVID description and loses its singularity and nuance. We see it in such novels as Deborah Levy’s August Blue, Michael Cunningham’s Day, and, most recently, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count, which let the virus in around the edges, tossing in familiar details that don’t ever branch, warp, or transform into a fully-fledged literary reflection on that time. Nearly all of these novels concentrate on middle-class or wealthy characters, and nearly all, as the critic Katy Waldman has said, “seem to regurgitate the [pandemic] rather than illuminate it, with phrases buckling under the freshly smarting facts that they are asked to grapple with.”

[Read: The pandemic novel that’s frozen in time]

Of course, the pandemic also gave us a lot of fiction that wrestles neither with lockdown nor with much of anything else in the real world. Genres such as romance that allow readers to temporarily abandon life’s difficulties have exploded in popularity among adults. As Alexandra Alter writes in The New York Times, their “appeal during times of turmoil and uncertainty is obvious: Romance novels offer comfort and escape, and the stories often land on what fans call an ‘H.E.A.’—a Happily Ever After.” Indeed, an H.E.A. is the ultimate example of controlled reality: Anyone reading a romance knows that it’s coming.

I can’t knock the escapism trend too hard: We’ve all got to get away sometimes. Literary fiction, meanwhile, has taken its own turn toward the predictable, in the form of autobiographical novels that challenge the reader only to guess what’s true or who the bad boyfriend might be in real life. On this front, I agree with the scholar Anna Kornbluh, who writes in her wide-ranging contemporary cultural study Immediacy, published in 2024, that literature’s aggressive autobiographical turn “deflate[s] the power of writing to fabricate.” COVID-description novels do the same. I’d rather see a book that, far from trying to help its writer and readers remember how the pandemic really felt, turns its confusion and uncertainty into a theme or a style—that uses the pandemic as something to imagine with.

Of the types of storytelling I’d be excited to see, my guess is that we’ll see a great social COVID novel first. After all, the social novel was born to help readers process—and help writers protest against—overwhelming, awful phenomena: Classic examples include Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a novel-length outcry against slavery, and Victor Hugo’s portrait of the French poor’s struggles in Les Misérables. More recently, the novelistic show The Wire tackled the many cruelties of the drug war in Baltimore, taking a different perspective for each of its five seasons. And Adelle Waldman’s polyvocal 2024 novel, Help Wanted, flips constantly among viewpoints to convey the life-altering impact that career instability has on part-time, hourly laborers at big, Walmart-like companies that won’t give their workers set schedules. I’d love a Help Wanted–type novel that shows the pandemic’s pre-vaccine horrors permanently changing characters who work in an emergency room or a public school struggling over when and how to reopen. I don’t mean to suggest that a great COVID novel must necessarily be serious: The “Bring out your dead” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail uses absurdity, the comedic opposite of satire, to make viewers feel the terrifying instability of living during the Black Death. Of course, the Pythons didn’t live through the plague themselves—and today, their sketch likely renders very differently for viewers who have undergone an experience of mass death. But such sharp-edged silliness might still be a useful technique to adapt in some form.

One impediment to the emergence of social COVID novels may be that many novelists are also nurses or cafeteria cooks or forklift drivers—a major problem in and of itself, though one that’s up to publishers rather than critics to solve—while authors who spent their lockdown days safely at home may feel uncomfortable writing about essential workers. Fair, but discomfort can be productive. So can leaving your desk. Waldman got a job at a big-box store in the Hudson Valley before writing Help Wanted. Research is an option; interviews are options; imagination is an option. All of the autobiographical novels of the past 10 years or so may have made us forget the potency of imagining things, but the case remains that writing compelling fiction requires you to unleash your subconscious. Setting a book in a world you don’t personally occupy—provided, of course, that you do your homework—isn’t a bad way to get there.

[Read: A big-box-store allegory]

The other kind of COVID literature that I’m eager to see is a great novel of the mind (by which I mean a great novel that takes place inside someone’s mind). Think Mrs. Dalloway, which, though it’s often taken as a completely interior book, is also about the First World War’s effects on English society. This type of storytelling will likely take longer. My guess is that a great interior COVID novel will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse that many pandemic novels thus far have suffered from, with its characters who are actively trying to manage their emotions and behavior. (One of the only pieces of COVID literature I’ve really liked thus far is Chris Bachelder and Jenn Habel’s book-length poem, Dayswork, which turns instead toward intellectualism and oddity; its speaker takes the pandemic as a reason, or an excuse, to give a Herman Melville obsession free rein.)

A contemporary example of this type of novel is Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, a doomy, unsettling tale that reveals itself, at its very end, to be about 9/11. Its protagonist, who aspires to sleep through a whole year with the help of psychiatric drugs, is patently not a stand-in for the United States, and yet her inner darkness, a source of both animation and rot, chimes with the violence of our national response to 9/11. As far as I’m concerned, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, which came out in 2018, is the only great 9/11 novel yet, and if it takes 17 years for a novel to find a comparably startling way to represent the pandemic’s traumatic effects, I won’t be surprised.

The most exciting fiction of all, naturally, would be the one I can’t yet conceive. I say this as both a critic and a novelist—and no, I don’t have my own COVID story in the hopper. All of my searching for a great pandemic novel has taught me that real literature about crisis has to come from more than anger or terror, more than the fundamentally self-centered impulse to say something or to add my memories to the general consciousness. I haven’t yet read the COVID novel I want, because I haven’t yet read one that truly submits to the uncontrollable reality of the pandemic, and the whole reason I want one is that I’m not there myself. After five years, I still can’t quite accept what happened. Whichever brave novelist manages to do so first will help the rest of us—and this time I mean the big us, not just writers—follow.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.