Fiction for a Pandemic

The world doesn't need more shelter-in-place/quarantine/pandemic thinkpieces, but there are two books I keep thinking about. Lots of people have been going on about Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a book I have not actually read, but I am given to understand is about a virus that wipes out 99% of the human race in a very short span of time, like in Survivors, which doesn't really feel like the coronavirus!

No, the science fiction story I keep thinking of is Sarah Pinsker's "Our Lady of the Open Road." It's set in a near-future United States, where the lingering social effects of a pandemic mean that people are skeptical of strangers, and large social gatherings are strongly discouraged, if not outright banned. Most music acts are now holograms that can be projected into one's living room, watched safely from home; the story follows one of the last live music acts, as they travel the country, desperately trying to cobble a living together out of underground live gigs.

At the time, it felt very fanciful. Now in this time where all concerts, all sporting events, all church services, all commencements, all parades, all blueberry picking has been cancelled it feels eerily prescient. A novel, Song for a New Day, that expands on the novella came out in 2019. I haven't picked it up yet, and now I'm not sure I have the courage to do so.

There are lots of science fiction stories about plagues and pandemics and viruses, but the book I keep coming back to actually isn't science fiction, or even about a plague, pandemic, or virus. It's Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther, a domestic novel set on the eve of World War II.

One of the weird boons of the coronavirus has been reconnecting and building new connections. Bereft of face-to-face contact except with the people who work at Publix, we've been participating in a lot of video calls. Weekly ones with grad school friends, and more with other family and friends, all people who under normal circumstances I talk to once every couple months at best. My sister and I have started doing crossword puzzles together using a site called Down for a Cross; we do at least one every day if not three or four, and it has become a daily ritual I really look forward to. I am getting to spend more time with my son, and I am more deliberate about the time I do spend with him. We go on walks through the neighborhood every day, sometimes two or three times, which means not only do we get some good family bonding, but that I have talked to my neighbors more in the past two-plus months than in the whole three-plus years I have lived in this community.

The passage I keep mentally coming back to is one near the end of the novel, where Mrs. Miniver writes a letter to her sister about all the ways the nation has come together since the war began, and how grand that is:

I can think of a hundred ways already in which the war has "brought us to our senses." But it oughtn't to need a war to make a nation paint its kerbstones white, carry rear-lamps on its bicycles, and give all its slum children a holiday in the country. And it oughtn't to need a war to make us talk to each other in buses, and invent our own amusements in the evenings, and live simply, and eat sparingly, and recover the use of our legs, and get up early enough to see the sun rise. However, it has needed one: which is about the severest criticism our civilization could have.

It oughtn't to need a pandemic to make me reach out to friends and family, and to talk to my neighbors. However, it has needed one.