The Literature of the Pandemic

The Atlantic

14-03-2025

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Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic 's books section:
As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown—fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom—but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the world knew the danger the virus posed but didn't know how to prevent its spread, people lacked a sense of agency: All that many of us could do was wait for news about case counts and vaccines. A writer's impulse to transcribe details from that time is perhaps an attempt to make that feeling more manageable. But 'fiction that asserts too much control loses the possibility of transformation,' Meyer argues. Her point is that no matter what's happening in the world, life is always unpredictable—and good literature understands this.
Meyer notes that she hasn't found a great pandemic novel yet. What form might this eventual writing take? One type of book she's hoping for is 'a great novel of the mind,' one that 'will either reject or undermine the self-controlling impulse' to describe the textures of the early pandemic and will instead examine, in surprising ways, how the catastrophe affected people's psyches.
As I read Meyer's essay, I remembered Sarah Moss's The Fell, a 2021 novel that I think may actually meet those criteria—at least in part. In it, a woman named Kate is quarantined with her son in her home in England's Peak District after a COVID exposure. She quickly grows stir-crazy, and one night, violating government orders, she goes out for a hike—but at some point, she falls and can't get up. Moss leaves Kate's perspective to dip into the minds of her son, a kindly older neighbor whom Kate and her son provide with groceries, and a member of the rescue team searching for Kate in the dark and wet night. Though the novel is certainly descriptive, it might also qualify as what Meyer calls an 'interior' work. The prose is written as a stream of consciousness, evoking a sense of anxiety that sometimes tips over into the truly scary.
For some, the experience of the early pandemic was not immediately life-threatening; often, it was an extended stretch of quotidian dullness spiked with moments of existential dread. But as one character thinks, 'people don't die of dread.' Moss doesn't exaggerate the stakes of the pandemic for her characters. Instead, she cleverly puts one of them in a genuinely frightening situation that has nothing to do with COVID, reminding the reader that the unfolding events of our lives are, by definition, beyond our control.
The Novel I'm Searching For
By Lily Meyer
Five years after the pandemic, I'm holding out for a story that doesn't just describe our experience, but transforms it.
What to Read
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho, by Anne Carson
Hardly any of Sappho's work survives, and the fragments scholars have salvaged from tattered papyrus and other ancient texts can be collected in thin volumes easily tossed into tote bags. Still, Carson's translation immediately makes clear why those scholars went to so much effort. Sappho famously describes the devastation of seeing one's beloved, when 'tongue breaks and thin / fire is racing under skin'; the god Eros, in another poem, is a 'sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in.' Other poems provide crisp images from the sixth century B.C.E.—one fragment reads, in its entirety: 'the feet / by spangled straps covered / beautiful Lydian work.' Taken together, the fragments are sensual and floral, reminiscent of springtime; they evoke soft pillows and sleepless nights, violets in women's laps, wedding celebrations—and desire, always desire. Because the poems are so brief, they're perfect for outdoor reading and its many distractions. Even the white space on the pages is thought-provoking. Carson includes brackets throughout to indicate destroyed papyrus or illegible letters in the original source, and the gaps they create allow space for rumination or moments of inattention while one lies on a blanket on a warm day. — Chelsea Leu
Out Next Week
📚 Firstborn, by Lauren Christensen
📚 White Light, by Jack Lohmann
📚 Hunchback, by Saou Ichikawa
Your Weekend Read
Reality TV Just Leveled Up
By Megan Garber
The Traitors, in that way, might seem to be peak reality TV: all of these people who are famous for being famous making content for the sake of content. But the show has been an ongoing subject of passionate discussion because it is much smarter than that—it's derivative in a winking way. It doesn't merely borrow from its fellow reality shows; it adapts them into something that both celebrates reality TV and offers a sly, kaleidoscopic satire of the genre. It is a messy show that lives for drama. It brings a postmodern twist to an ever-more-influential form of entertainment. It's not just reality TV—it's hyperreality TV.