Fiction inspired by the pandemic

The literary response to historic tragedies has been a process of absorbing trauma - often beginning with poetry and non-fiction and, after months or years, expanding to narrative fiction.

New York: Near the end of 2020, the pandemic had lasted long enough for author Jodi Picoult to try something that seemed unthinkable for novelists in its early stages – turn it into fiction.

“At the beginning of the pandemic, I couldn’t even read, much less write. I didn’t have the focus,” says Picoult, who last November began the novel “Wish You Were Here.”

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The literary response to historic tragedies has been a process of absorbing trauma – often beginning with poetry and non-fiction and, after months or years, expanding to narrative fiction. The pandemic has now lasted into a second fall season for publishing, and a growing number of authors, among them Picoult, Louise Erdrich, Gary Shteyngart and Hilma Wolitzer, have worked it into their latest books.

Amitava Kumar’s “A Time Outside This Time” tells of an Indian-American author working at an artists retreat and trying to make sense of President Donald Trump, 24-hour media and an equally relentless virus.

Kumar began the book before the pandemic, but found it fit well – too well – into an existing wave of misinformation, “fake news,” reaching from the US to his native India.
Erdrich’s “The Sentence,” her first since the Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Night Watchman,” centers on a Minneapolis bookstore in 2020 and the city’s multiple crises, from the pandemic to the murder of George Floyd.

“By the end, I realized that although we might want to forget parts of 2020, we should not forget,” she wrote in a recent email. “Obviously, we can’t forget. We have to use what we learned.”