Despite the desires of some readers, nobody should expect any good novels about Covid.

Troy, Turkey 2011

Despite the desires of some readers, nobody should expect any good novels about Covid. This doesn’t mean that a good novel won’t be set during Covid’s peak. Nor does it mean that Covid won’t affect the story in a good novel. What it means, instead, is that Covid won’t be the driving force behind the story in any good novels, in the same way that good novels are not primarily driven by what’s political or cultural or historic.

Of course this isn’t the typical assumption. For some readers, novels are created to describe what’s communal, such as the turmoil and instability and disorder of public life, with the stories that we tell essentially political documents, closer to chronological archives than character dramas. Implicit in this preference is the desire to value literature with some external quality—whether that’s a fidelity to history, an ideological commitment, or the right sensibility. Storytelling is secondary. Characters exist to satisfy roles. And literary value follows social value.

Now there are still good novels set in turbulent and notable times: World War I directs and is necessary to understand The Return of the Soldier, The Great Depression is the condition that triggers The Grapes of Wrath, and World War II is the sole reason the characters in The Naked and the Dead even come together. Whether the subject is the Cold War or the Vietnam War, the 1980s boom on Wall Street or the Financial Crisis, we do have novels about events that we mark as historic pivots. In nearly every instance, however, the stories that we end up remembering are oriented as character dramas, where the stage has a background of warfare or statecraft or civic tragedy. That stage does redound onto the characters, it does provide a thrust to the narrative, but we don’t remember the novels that merely exhibit a setting—we remember the novels that infuse a particular setting with a personal drama.

To believe otherwise is to believe that Moby-Dick is about whaling, that Crime and Punishment is about solving a murder, or that Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series is about 20th Century Naples. Characters and drama are what most evoke the social atmosphere in these novels: the spark comes from the individual, and the particular, and those elements ignite the narrative. Even though J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace provides an intricate and engrossing portrait of post-apartheid South Africa, he accomplishes that through the specific character of David Lurie, by showing how the choices made in one life continue to reverberate; even though The Great Gatsby is considered a Jazz Age novel, we only view that period through the individual experiences and decisions of Nick Carraway; and even though Toni Morrison’s Beloved captures a moment in history, it does that with the character of Sethe, in Denver, even in the presence of Beloved. Only through the specificity of character do these novels represent grander periods: it is the close examination of the sand grain in all its glassy detail that best captures the entire beach.

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What’s remarkable is that specificity and individuality in literature also ends up introducing a paradox: the universal. Even the most extreme states, and the most distant scenarios, start to feel common when characters are depicted with precision. Your past doesn’t have to include murder for you to appreciate how Dostoevsky conjures the visceral feeling of Raskolnikov’s rage; nor is there any need for you to have lived as a teenage girl in Italy to comprehend how Ferrante conveys the turmoil and complications of friendship. It is the emotional precision in these stories that elicits a sensation that’s more eternal than any passing trend—there’s no need to be Russian or Italian to appreciate what’s most human about these characters. Yet poor novels still structure the narrative around what’s politically hip, or on the most recent catastrophe, only to end up bending and reworking and misshaping both character and story to accommodate events.

War and Peace is another grand canvas that avoids this trap. Written six decades after the Napoleonic Wars, the novel captures the atmosphere in Russia at the beginning of the 19th Century, and provides the reader with a more refined understanding of the texture and spirit and nuances of those years than from any comparable non-fiction book. Yet Tolstoy doesn’t create this atmosphere by simply reporting facts—what makes War and Peace into a novel, and what makes it memorable, isn’t the accuracy of its history, it is how Tolstoy reveals the ambience of those years through the machinations of particular characters. When people remember the novel, they remember Pierre or Natasha Rostov or Prince Andrei, because the core drama occurs between the characters. And most contemporary references to War and Peace aren’t even references, in fact, to the Napoleonic Wars: the novel is typically used to interpret contemporary events, to describe the limits of leadership, or to explain the folly of human motivations. Tolstoy imbues his characters with such specificity and intensity that we seamlessly imagine those passions in different contexts.

For the major Shakespeare plays that we classify as histories the same principle applies. We reach back and effortlessly compare distant characters with modern contexts, such as how Richard III tells us more about ambition and power and decline than it tells us about the real King Richard III. Contemporary audiences don’t watch the play four hundred years later because they want a history lesson about the War of the Roses. Audiences want, instead, the Shakespearean creation of Richard III in all his grandiosity and obsessiveness—with history as the stage on which the character stands.

All of this suggests that a good novel set during Covid might, for instance, open with a young couple in New York who decides to divorce the day before lockdown begins. The story centers on these two characters, their abrupt confinement, the conflict between them, and, in those details and that drama, the vividness of March 2020 lands on the page, with the mess and confusion and isolation of Covid in New York witnessed through a very specific lens. And if this novel is still read a century from now, it will result from the intensity of its characters, rather than from the accuracy of its pandemic facts. Obviously future readers might find details about the pandemic intriguing, but a novel that concentrates on those facts will be a poor substitute for the journalistic and academic work that is sure to survive.

This isn’t to dismiss the political, or to ignore culture, but it’s to pinpoint what a novel does best. Expecting a novel to perform every social function and limiting its scope to a chronology of news is, at a minimum, misguided; it also implies that the grandest aspirations of the literary world is to reflect events. But there’s a reason we don’t confuse photographs with paintings, and why we expect our photographers to capture different sensations than our painters. Every discipline has its strengths, and a record of history is a waste of a novel, especially because when you sacrifice rich and dynamic characters for contemporary references you ensure that you get neither. Of course many people will continue to evaluate novels based on their contemporary accuracy, even though that mentality would also summarize Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron—where a group flees Florence to avoid The Black Death, and then narrates one hundred tales about fate and power and humor and loss and love—as a story about the plague.

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