Simultaneous Invention, Parameters, and Pandemics
How Do Novelists Contend with March 2020?
A benefit of being an editor is watching a lot of talented creative people contend with the same set of parameters and see their different ways of dealing with them. Certain types of books or themes or settings become popular and then comes a plethora of books using the same conventions. For example, we’ve probably come close to seeing every way that WWII could possibly be used narratively over the past couple of decades. Or, more recently, the podcaster/podcast has become a dominant mode of storytelling in the mystery thriller genre, as a slew of fictional true crime podcasters must return home and grapple with the crimes or the secrets or the multiple serial killers they left behind a long time ago.
Certain ideas also become imbedded in the collective subconscious that novelists — and other artists — begin to arrive at the same subject matter or conceptions of novels. It’s similar to multiple discoveries in science (a fun Wikipedia page to scroll through), sometimes more intuitively called simultaneous invention. In art this plays out in sillier ways sometimes, like how in 2013 major film studios released White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, two movies with the exact same, very specific premise. After 2016, it will probably not surprise readers that dozens of novels about a dystopian future where the country is split into warring factions crossed my desk, which is also the premise of the recent orginal film aptly titled Civil War.
The inverse of simultaneous invention is also true—while writers sometimes arrive to the same conclusion or set of parameters, there are other kinds of parameters they have to deal with and don’t have a choice in the matter. The most obvious recent example is the year that changed everyone’s lives and the way all of society functioned: March 2020. Lockdowns, vaccines, masks, distance, death, and division.
Narrative Shifting Dates
If you’re struggling to read on or inclined to tune out at the very mention of the pandemic, there’s no shame in that. Unlike the romantic notions or depths of the human condition that something like WWII has given rise to in fiction, the pandemic is squarely unpleasant, even to consider the narrative possibilities of. Novelists seem to feel the same way as many people do: they would rather not think or talk about the pandemic. Thus, the primary way I’ve been seeing writers deal with 2020 is to set their novels in 2018 or 2019. Novelist Dolly Alderton set her latest novel Good Material, a rom-com(ish) novel about a failed standup comedian who navigates a breakup, in late 2019. The novel ends ominously months before the pandemic begins, and even as Alderton has avoided the narrative constraints of the pandemic, as a reader you find yourself aware of the looming date and considering what doom is right around the corner for her characters.
Like September 11th, 2001 is for American writers, the Pandemic of 2020 will forever be an atmosphere-shifting, seismic event that cannot be ignored if a novel’s timeline crosses that year. With the difference being that the pandemic carries even more practical issues to deal with for a fiction writer— people wear masks, aren’t on the streets, and many don’t go to school or work. Undoubtedly, writers avoid the pandemic because it makes telling any kind of story much harder logistically. When people can’t move or interact freely it’s much harder in lockdown to create conflict and incident. COVID becomes inconvenient obstacle that must be explained or explained away at every turn.
Some respected novelists have tried to tackle the pandemic head-on. Weike Wang’s second novel Joan Is Okay (January 2022), is an intimate character study about an ICU doctor in New York. The pandemic hits somewhere in the middle of Joan Is Okay, and it is dealt with in a realistic way from a doctor’s point of view. Joan, who is already pretty comfortable being alone, deals with this change in circumstance with remarkable ease. Another highly respected novelist Gary Shteyngart uses the pandemic as a plot device for a more trapped room, or a “bottle episode” as it’s known in television. In Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends (November 2021), a group of eight wealthy friends retreats upstate to spend lockdown together—relationship drama ensues.
Wang’s and Shteyngart’s pandemic novels show the limitations imposed by the pandemic’s set of rules. Harder than working in the logistics to the novel’s narrative — both novelists are able to do it with skill — is the fact that the pandemic quickly eclipses the story and characters. Perhaps it is just because these writers — and their readers— were so fresh from the pandemic that seeing a novelization of something we were already familiar with meant that the pandemic elements suck the air out of the room. We all lived through crises of PPE, making the trek to get groceries in fear, and watched the horror in hospitals unfold. Although these writers do an admirable job of feeding the pandemic back to us, both novels, good in other ways, feel like they let the parameters take over rather than expand what is imaginable under these set of circumstances.
Before and After
The other possibility is that instead of tackling a difficult subject head-on, you can talk around it. There’s already a language for this in science fiction and speculative novels: Before and After. Like 9/11 has in fiction, one role the pandemic might play is to act as a mental line in the sand that writers can manipulate. The pandemic is a real event of apocalyptic gravity, and without explicitly setting a novel in 2020 or 2021, it can be used as a reference point to make a narrative shift. Consider again Dolly Alderton’s Good Material and all of the tension there is to be created right before The Very Bad Thing happens. We know something the characters don’t and that creates a lot of tension for us as readers. Or the pandemic can be used, as Ann Patchett did in her recent novel Tom Lake, as a framing device: a mother recounts a “before” story to her adult daughters as they are all forced together back at home by the pandemic.
There is also the option to use the pandemic as a sort of “time jump.” The most obvious way would be to, let’s say, separate two lovers for an extended period or interrupt some other important meeting from happening. Like the Kennedy Assassination was for a previous generation, or Pearl Harbor for the generation before that, the pandemic becomes a shorthand that doesn’t necessarily have to be delved into in order for a novelist to use it effectively to ground the story or develop characters. As apocalypse novelists from Stephen King to Tom Perrotta, to Cormac McCarthy have known, it is often the fallout and aftermath that is more humanly interesting than the misery of the during.
Final Thoughts
Many predicted during the pandemic that an event of this size would have as much influence on art as it did everything else. It did seem to have a positive effect on creativity as many artists finally had space, time, and quiet to create. But although there have been thousands of novels published since the pandemic and many television shows and movies made during and after, no one seems to have harnessed the full potential of the 2020 pandemic as a narrative device. Maybe this will happen in time and I will eagerly wait for that one submission or novel that invariably wows and proves it can be done against the odds.