Many of us are familiar with dystopian novels thanks to our middle school days. I know that genre was huge when I was young with novels like "The Hunger Games", "Divergent" and "Matched" filling my bookshelves. In many of these books, dystopia may have been set off by some sort of plague or decades of infertility and so on. However, now that all of us have actually lived through that period, how are we bound to reflect on it in literature?
At the beginning of the pandemic, I remember seeing a joke on one of my social media feeds about how TV shows and movies were going to incorporate Covid into their plots or if they were planning on just wiping 2020 completely away and pretending it never happened- a route many were more than happy with. However, some authors chose to take the virus head-on and incorporate it into their art.
Alexandra Alter wrote an article for The New York Times titled "The Problem With the Pandemic Plot" where she reflects upon how "literary novelists are struggling with whether, and how, to incorporate Covid into their fiction."
Alter notes that authors are "exploring, sometimes reluctantly, the emotional and psychological reverberations of the pandemic." However, not every author agrees on how to approach the issue, making this article an extremely interesting read.
Above all, I think it is still crucial to address that the pandemic isn't over yet, leaving writers with complete creative freedom over how to close out their stories. Alter includes a quote from writer and critic Daniel Mendelsohn that I think encapsulates this beautifully. He says, “You couldn’t yet have the great coronavirus novel, because we don’t know how this story ends yet.”
Read The New York Times article by clicking on the photo above.
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