What Do We Want From Pandemic Novels?

A survey of books over the years

We have seen something of an explosion of pandemic novels in the past few decades, but it is only very recently that I have felt okay with reading them. Having lived through 2020 in New York as a medical student and then a resident, in many ways I still feel close to the darkest and most existential moments of those early months. Even when the virus and its effects were hidden away from the public eye, it persisted for years within the walls of the hospital.

But in the years before Covid took the world by storm, before we could possibly know what was coming, we were reading pandemic novels. For some, they were an escape, or a reaction to a too-comfortable world, like in the case of dystopian and post-apocalyptic novels. For others, maybe they exercised that part of the brain that we use for problem solving: if it were me stuck in a global pandemic, what would I do?

In the early 2000s, most people alive had not lived through a major global illness that threatened their existence; the last pandemic on a similar scale was the 1918 Influenza pandemic (for which, interestingly, we have very few primary accounts). But despite our lack of experience with pandemics, we have always felt close to death, crying wolf when SARS, MERS, and Ebola started to make headlines.

Copper engraving of a plague doctor of 17th Century Rome | Wikipedia

In 2014, Emily St. John Mandel, a writer of pandemic novels if there every was one, wrote an essay in The New Republic: You’ll Probably Never Catch Ebola — So Why Is The Disease So Terrifying?

“Illness carries, even now, a terrible mystery.” She writes, “…we often still don’t always know why some people develop cancer and others don’t, or why some cancers disappear following treatment while others lie dormant, only to blossom over the PET scans with a deathly radiance years later. We don’t always know why some hearts fail and others beat for a century. In flu season, it isn’t always clear why some people get sick while others don’t.”

The unknown, whether it is illness, death, or supernatural phenomena, has always been fascinating to us. And such topics make for rich art.

Emily St. John Mandel’s latest novel, Sea of Tranquility, is infused with the unknown: space, time, disease, humanity — none of this is knowable. By sharing these mysteries, Mandel creates an incredibly rich canvas for us to explore:

A Post-Covid World

Pandemics don’t approach like wars with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you with seemingly no intermediate step.

— Emily St. John Mandel, Sea of Tranquility

The Covid pandemic ended just as abruptly as it began: in retrospect. Can anyone pinpoint the moment that it disappeared?¹ One minute it was there, everywhere, and the next, it was gone.

And, now that we have lived in such close approximation to that kind of terror, it can no longer be pure escapism that draws us to these books — can it? What is it that we look for in pandemic novels now?

In the early months of lockdown, thousands of readers picked up The Plague by Albert Camus, looking for lessons, insights, or possibly, hope. Others picked up non-fiction like John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza. And more generally, it also became clear that the pandemic changed the way we read (that’s a whole other topic ripe for discussion — another time).

But the pandemic wasn’t just changing reading habits; it was also changing the way books were written.

In 2022, an article came out in The New York Times called The Problem With the Pandemic Plot, which explored the many ways the pandemic disrupted fiction writing.

“Some writers worry a pandemic plot might drive away readers who want to escape our grim reality, but ignoring it might feel jarringly unrealistic. Others wonder if it’s too soon to recreate the atmosphere of a tragedy that’s still killing thousands of people every day. Then there’s the awkward narrative problem of how to turn what some have termed the “boring apocalypse” — a period of stasis that, for the most fortunate, has been defined by staying home and doing nothing — into a gripping story.”

I myself struggled with some of these issues when I picked up Lucy by the Sea, by Elizabeth Strout, in September of 2023. Described as a story “rich with empathy and emotion,” this book follows Lucy Barton through quarantine, which she spends with her ex-husband in a small cottage in Maine. What I thought was going to be an intricate character study and exploration of a complicated relationship turned out to be essentially a detailed diary of quarantine: the masks, the public outcry against masks, then the return to masks; the wiping down of groceries; the horrible trucks of dead bodies I thought I would never have to think about again — it was all there.

I didn’t need to re-experience the pandemic, I realized. I had my own records and memories of that time period, and I didn’t need any more.

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1562 | Wikipedia

But, on the other hand, as the NYT article continues: “fiction can provide a way to process the emotional upheaval of the past two years.”

Severance, a post-apocalyptic novel by Ling Ma, which, amazingly, was published in 2018 (if you read the novel now you’ll find eerie echoes of Covid that will make you wonder whether Ma could see the future), uses the consequences of a pandemic to tear apart our ideas of capitalism, nostalgia, work culture, and individualism. It has been a few years since I read this book, but I still find myself thinking about it often.

Station Eleven, also written before Covid, takes the idea of an apocalypse even further and sets the entire book in a time when 99% of the world’s population has been killed by a deadly flu. In this novel, Mandel wonders not what we do while a pandemic is raging, but afterwards, when only a few survive. This novel has been given a whole new life in the years following Covid, and though I personally didn’t love it as much as Sea of Tranquility, thousands have found solace in its pages.

In fact, Substack writer

Natalie McGlocklin

wrote very recently: “When the New York Times released its list of top books since 2000, I knew almost instantly that the epidemic novel was the plotline, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel was the book of the century, for me.”²

There are dozens of other books set specifically during Covid that I’m interested in: Day by Michael Cunningham, The Sentence by Louis Erdrich, and Intimations by Zadie Smith, to name a few. But I’m still nervous; do these books explore questions about illness, purpose, and meaning, in a way that draws me in? Will they offer insight or hope? Or will they simply relay back to me the horrible drudgery and dread of each day in quarantine?

So readers, leave a comment below or reply directly to this email to let us know: what do you want from pandemic novels? Which ones have you loved or loathed?

— Shruti

P.S. If you enjoyed exploring time travel and the simulation hypothesis in Sea of Tranquility, you will love this excellent conversation between Ezra Klein and Emily St. John Mandel:

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Next Up

Next on the podcast we’ll be discussing Piranesi by Susanna Clarke. This book needs almost no introduction — since it was published, every type of reader, from fantasy die-hards to literary lovers, has picked up and loved it. The episode will be out on June 19.

But until then, don’t go anywhere, because we’ll be back in your inboxes next week to talk even more about Sea of Tranquility, time travel, and the simulation hypothesis.

1. Yes, I know, Covid still exists, and people still get sick, and the newspapers are telling us to brace ourselves for another wave this summer — but it’s no longer a pandemic or international health emergency.

2. To add to this thesis that pandemics are the theme of the century: the first illness novel I ever read, in middle school, was Fever 1793, about a Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic — which, fittingly, was published in the year 2000.