One lesson of the past year is that our pandemic was not at all a surprise to epidemiologists, public health officials, or those like Shepard who pay attention to their warnings. Nor is it surprising to hear-as the catalog copy is quick to point out-that he completed his new novel Phase Six before COVID-19 emerged. It would be hard to nominate a more fitting writer than Jim Shepard, with his track record of unassuming but powerful work about the forces of history and the pressures they exert on the future. The more interesting question is: who will write the good fiction about it? Who will wrestle with the beast itself, and not just use it as window dressing? Certainly there will be bad fiction about the pandemic, if there isn’t already-but there’s bad fiction about everything. No one living through hard times wanted to read a book about those same hard times, and a looming glut of rushed lockdown stories was thought to be the next invisible threat. No one wants to read your quarantine fiction, they insisted. Last March, tweets urging writers to refrain from writing about the pandemic were so common they became as tiresome as the phenomenon they hoped to head off.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |