Beware the Quarantine Books!

Years of bad fiction & nonfiction incoming!

I think it was this week when it finally dawned on me that we’re right at the edge of a wave of cookie-cutter, inward-gazing, quarantine-style literature. You can see it now; bookstore shelves packed with pastel-colored covers, with stocky tech-inspired Serif fonts, intricately designed by marketing departments for gullible little millennials like me, with book-titles like My Year of Zoom and Sourdough, or War and Microsoft-Teams. We’re barreling towards a future preoccupied with the very-near past, where writers drop their little versions of the ‘Covid Novel’ or self-indulgent memoirs written as vignettes to the Tik-Tok trends that kept themselves (and us) distracted while we were at home, coping. A whole cottage industry will arise from all of this – and lots of people will make money off of the strange nostalgia for the shows and podcasts that fit into the background of our lives. Certainly, one or two of these will be strong enough to make some unfortunate kiddo’s English syllabus in 2060-something, and we can imagine it will be surrounded by weeks of lecturing and pop-quizzes on prompts such as ‘Please, in four sentences, describe the impact of Tiger King on the limited-imaginations of the quarantined.’

One of the first books that I’ve read in this mold was What Just Happened, by Charles Finch, which is a sort of day-by-day diary-style accounting of a writer’s experience during the pandemic. ­­His memoir stretches from early March of 2020 up until early 2021, and it probably reads no different than many people’s diaries, with March entries spent fretting about hand-sanitizer, and the possibility of “… as many as 20,000 people” dying from the virus in America, and paragraphs easily slipping into discussions of upsetting celebrity tweets, and dumb Trump quotes, and troubles with the grocery supply-chain. It’s relentlessly boring – but we can’t fault Finch. After all, he didn’t create the pandemic or invent the idea that we should just ‘stay at home, and do nothing more. He’s a victim of the times – much as we all are.

Occasionally the world pops in to say ‘Hello!’ in his writing, but then it quickly departs. May 2020 arrives, and Finch watches Los Angeles and America grapple with one of the largest civil rights movements in modern history. But he might as well just be writing about Twitter. “I thought I had lived through history until I lived through history.” He writes, during the thick of the protests. “It’s addictive. The pictures of the protests are addictive to look at.” There’s an inkling that history-making is restorative and exciting, but he’s trapped inside – both physically and politically. He watches history from afar and doesn’t jump in to join the masses, because he and we have all been told that righteousness comes from staying inside and binging television. June and July arrive, and the movement fades entirely from his entries. The protests are just another spectacle, a flurry of images to be consumed and half-digested, and they hook us all in the same way that a bad tweet or a good YouTube video does. Here, I admire his honesty. I think he’s perfectly in line with how the protests were viewed by so many of us; a fad, a burst of spontaneous energy to marvel at for a short while, before turning away and back towards normal.

He is about the millionth person to think about the pandemic in terms of a ‘war’. It’s a trope by now that we have probably all slipped into. Finch, while perhaps a little disappointed with the lack of glamor in this kind of war, isn’t convinced that he – or we – have done precisely anything wrong by staying home. He writes that “… the majority of people’s job in a war is to sit at home and save tin and string and worry, and in fact that’s exactly what we did.” This is a little generous of him. Of course, he’s thinking about an event such as the Second World War, where a good part of the American civilian population planted victory gardens in their backyards, collected cans and glass bottles, and bought war bonds to support the Allied armies in Europe and the Pacific. But it would be more accurate of him to say that most people, during wartime, stay home and do absolutely nothing differently. That’s the clear history of America during Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s a perfect embodiment of President George W. Bush’s plea to Americans after 9/11 to “… Go about their business…”, and “… get down to Disney World.” By those metrics, we’re all red-blooded patriots when we binge The Mare of Easttown.

It’s not entirely fair to pick on Finch. Parts of his book are lovely. I’m more worried about all of the similarly-minded Covid books we’ll get in the future – all variations of cooped-up, MFA’ers waxing on about work-from-home, the gloominess of siren-pierced skies, the difficulty of getting laid during quarantine. We’re probably in for a rough patch. Buckle-in. I’m personally worried about Obama’s recommended book-list at the end of 2022.

Yet there’s also precedent to think that we could be in for some good literature in the months, years, generations ahead. Early on in those March and April days of quarantine, I got back into the history of the First World War. The anxieties of that age subconsciously felt familiar (emptiness, bleakness, confusion), and the war was also similar to the virus in that it was, essentially, pointless, and a cataclysmic waste of human life that evaded people’s need to find reason in things. The kind of WW1 literature that stands out still was written by those who dealt most abruptly with the horrors of the war – the soldiers, female medics, and families destroyed by the deaths of loved ones. It’s why schools still assign Erich Maria’s Remarque’s story of a German soldier hopelessly cut out of civilian life, or Ernest Hemingway’s post-war characters haunted by spiritual nothingness and a need to push the demons away through drink, sex, and distraction.

Fortunately, there’s good reason to think that the great and meaningful pieces of Covid literature will be written by those who experienced and are still experiencing this pandemic most starkly; the medical professionals, the ‘essential workers’, the aging, the dying, those that gathered in the streets and marched and organized despite repression. My sense is that those stories will take longer to unfurl because they’re still being lived and written. Crucially, the pandemic is still an evolving, killing beast; publishing a definitive Covid piece now is a fool’s errand. You might as well write the definitive WW1 novel about a man who followed the Western Front in the New York Times.

But for now, we’ll be in for a few years of the sourdough starters, the takes on Love is Blind, the intricate silhouettes of uncertain figures behind facemasks, and neurotic big-city characters boring us with sprawling subconscious rants on quarantine. The good stuff will take time. We just have to lock up, stay safe, and keep our distance.