3 Defining Novels of the COVID-19 Pandemic

I am a lifelong Sigrid Nunez superfan. The Vulnerables was one of the first wave of COVID-19 novels that I read while still drafting my own, and I enjoyed Nunez’s depictions of the small details and internal crises of life in early lockdown. Nunez’s writing illuminated, for me, the widening fault lines in internet-age American society that predated but were turbo-charged by the pandemic: the mutual incomprehensibility and hostility along lines of gender, race, and generation that ha e come to characterize our politics. Nunez’s protagonist is a cautiously conservative, aging female writer who finds herself puzzled and threatened by the surging social mores of the younger generations. In fact, Nunez’s protagonist ends up quarantining with companions who include, per the book’s description, “an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot.” The concern and bewilderment that Nunez’s generation exhibits towards my generation made me interested in exploring the psychological impacts of COVID-19 on younger Americans.

Louise Erdrich, the inveterate novelist, does more than self-reflect during the pandemic: she invents a whole fictional world. It’s a ghost story following an Indigenous woman working at a haunted independent bookstore in Minneapolis, charting a year of reckoning from 2019-2020. I delighted in the setting: Minneapolis was the heart of our country’s moral reckoning around anti-Blackness, and again in resisting ICE. Coincidentally, I also spent part of the pandemic living there. I remain a fierce fan of the city and its literary scene, as rendered by Erdrich—they represent America’s finest.

This is an autofictional novel about the author’s descent into COVID-induced insanity. “[Lockwood] was among the first writers to give shape to the cognitive estrangement of the virus, its febrile illogic,” celebrated The Guardian. I had no idea Lockwood was on this wave while I was writing Unprecedented Times, but I felt excitement and comradeship in this group project of rendering the disillusionment and bewilderment of the 2020s.