The pandemic should not be a literary prop in novels

As is the case for many, reading for me serves the purpose of escaping reality; there is nothing better than curling up with a book and forgetting everything on my to-do list for a few hours. When lost in a good book, it’s easy to forget the pains of day-to-day life. Instead, you swap for a reality that might very well have its faults, but whose problems I don’t have to carry with me. This ability to escape into another world is an essential requirement for me to like a book — when I am reminded of my own reality that escape is often broken.

During the years following the height of the pandemic, there was nothing worse for me as a reader than being halfway through a book I was enjoying to realize that it was set between 2019 to 2021. Having an author write their characters into our reality felt like a clumsy grab at relevancy, a misguided attempt at relating to readers through the event they most wanted to escape. I was exhausted from living the daily reality of COVID-19 — I didn’t feel any desire to read about it.

The 50 or so pages of pandemic email flirtation in Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Romantic Comedy” was, to say the least, an unwelcome reminder of what trying to get in contact with loved ones was like during 2020. Reading about a love story getting upended by a global pandemic was too real for me but also seemed to have no place in a novel that was previously focused on the budding romance between a famous singer and comedy writer; I was left wondering what is it that’s so romantic or funny about COVID-19. Although the novel technically falls under the category of contemporary romance, I much preferred the setting of the book, which, in my mind, existed in a nondescript year that could be applied to any pre-pandemic reality. A reality that had no concern with the deadly stakes of a pandemic, but rather one in which the protagonist only had to think about true love and their one annoying coworker. 

In one of my favorite books, “Beautiful World, Where Are You” by Sally Rooney, the abrupt jump to a COVID-19 timeline gave me whiplash. The novel is structured so it can flow seamlessly into the social distancing mandated by COVID-19 through the letters sent back and forth between best friends Alice and Eileen. While I would argue the novel is a bit more introspective than the romance of “Romantic Comedy” (not to say those two facets are mutually exclusive), I was still put off by the inclusion of COVID-19 in the novel when so much had not been about the pandemic up until that point. 

To that point, my distaste for the inclusion of COVID-19 in so many novels is due to its lack of centrality to the stories it shows up in. In both of the aforementioned books, COVID-19 appears as an afterthought to the actual plot of the novels, almost as a bridge between the unmarked time of the stories and our present-day timeline. Reading about COVID-19 in these novels first served as a stark reminder of what had been, but also as a frustrating read when not adequately representative of the agony that those months of confusion and waiting held. Reading about the pandemic in these novels without the context and tension of the world it brought with it feels as if we aren’t doing ourselves justice in remembering what we’ve been through. The pandemic wasn’t just sending emails and staying home with family — it was stockpiling dry goods and toiletries, agonizing over the upcoming presidential election in the U.S. and waiting week after week to see if the lockdown would finally be lifted. These novels scratch the surface of this tension, but they just don’t feel like enough. 

Up until recently, reading about COVID-19 frustrated me for both the lack of escapism it provided as well as the willful misrepresentation of a reality we all experienced — now, however, I’m finding myself more and more willing to read about this topic so long as it’s given a fair focus. 

“Sea of Tranquility” by Emily St. John Mandel is one novel that does a particularly good job of incorporating COVID-19 into its plot. The novel jumps back and forth between centuries and characters, exploring the humanity that is lost and found when confronted with the sickness of a pandemic and the possibility of human connection across time. Discussion of a pandemic mirrors current realities and future predictions. While COVID-19 is not the novel’s main focus, the pandemic is interwoven with the struggles of the characters we are reading about; it isn’t written about in passing but rather deeply entangled with the novel itself. If I were to take COVID-19 out of “Beautiful World, Where Are You” and “Romantic Comedy,” the reader would be left with a reality that makes sense — in “Sea of Tranquility,” not so much. 

The COVID-19 pandemic was the first thing I’ve lived through that I knew would be written about in history books forever — this is a part of our lives that will be discussed for its hand in molding the generations that experienced it. But reading about the pandemic in novels of all genres is a distinct reminder that the definition of what we deem “normal” is evolving. It’s possible that reading about it in books published so close to the years during which COVID-19 upended our lives made the effects of the pandemic seem too final, as if we had already moved on. Maybe I’m just not ready to see COVID-19 being used as a literary prop to move a story along. 

While there are certain books I did not enjoy seeing COVID-19 thrown onto the pages of, I now find myself opening up to stories that incorporate an accurate representation of the events we all lived through. Maybe I will never fully be satisfied with the way COVID-19 is written about in books because it will never perfectly mirror the way I lived it. But this is just my first taste of what it feels like to read about the history I’ve lived as a passing glance in a fictional world, and it’s time I start getting used to it. 

Daily Arts Writer Logan Brown can be reached at loganvb@umich.edu.

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