No, I'm Probably Not Going to Read Your Covid Novel
opinion
I’ve skimmed a few Covid novels by American writers. And I only skimmed because I keep thinking there is no writer talented enough, as of yet, to handle the pandemic in all of its complexities. There ain’t no American writer with Dostoevsky-ish ambition or genius.
I’m a pro-vaccination member of the political left (and also a Native American whose tribe was nearly blinked out by smallpox and also a survivor of multiple brain surgeries (thank you, science!)) but I’m also a Native American who is reflexively suspicious of the USA government (Hello, broken treaties!) and its past, present, and future misdemeanors and felonies.
I find it impossible to fully believe in any politician or political institution. I’ve only participated in one protest march and would’ve quit marching almost immediately if I hadn’t been one of the people holding the big banner at the front of the pack. I don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. I’m not terminally cynical. Cynical people don’t vote or they fling their seemingly-romantic vote at the minor candidate who is most like them. I just know that I’m voting for a flawed human, in a flawed two-party system. whom I hope will do the greater amount of good—with good being one of the most amorphous concepts.
In short, I vote with existential optimism.
Here in leftist and Covid-jumpy Seattle, I still see people wearing surgical masks while outside walking their dogs. And I have two thoughts when I see them. The empathetic thought: “Maybe they have a health condition that puts them at higher risk.” And the [self ] mocking thought: “God, that person and I probably vote for the same people.”
And, don’t worry, I also mock you anti-vaxxers: “Someday, the 10% kill rate pandemic will arrive and the anti-vaxxers will be denying it exists as they’re bleeding out of their eyes.” But, also, dear anti-vaxxers, I think, “Well, hey, the CDC kept the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment going…until 1972.”
And, yup, as Time magazines notes:
Over the six-year period that had followed the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers were actually even higher.
And, yet, somehow, because of Covid and Trump and other disasters, we live in an era where the political left extols institutions like the FBI. I’ve even heard Indians praising the FBI. What the fuck is happening in the world when Indians—leftist Indians—are praising the FBI?
In the Native American world, FBI means Federal Bureau of Investigation and it means Full Blooded Indian and never will the two find peace together.
So, if your Covid novel doesn’t include these kind of enormous, baffling, and hilarious contradictions, and create compelling characters grappling with these contradictions, then it’s just skimmable.
During Covid, I’ve gone from the utterly terrified dude buying loads of canned goods to the amused guy who bought dozens of cans of awful (and likely to never be eaten) chili because all the good chili had been raided.
I have many family and friends who are anti-vaxx. I love them. And they love me.
My little sister, critically ill with Covid, was on a ventilator for two weeks in December 2020 and we’d all said our goodbyes to her over an iPad before she made a miraculous recovery, though she continues to struggle with Long Covid.
I was sick with Covid in August 2023 and it was not “just a bad flu.” My throat was so sore that it was painful to breathe. It hurt so bad to swallow that I just put a towel under my chin and drooled all damn day. My body ached as if I’d been pummeled by baseball bats and golf clubs. I’ve never been that sick with “just a bad flu.” And my symptoms were relatively minor.
And I have friends who work in healthcare—tough and experienced nurses and doctors—who tell horror stories about all the deaths they witnessed—all the lives they could not save. I know healthcare pros who’ve retired early or changed jobs because of their Covid PTSD.
So, yes, I repeat: I am pro-vaccination. Fully so. But I’m also fully suspicious of fiction that is nakedly pro- or anti-vaccination. You want to show me you’re a great writer? How about a Covid novel where the left and right are wise and foolish in equal and idiosyncratic measures?
If you want your Covid novel (or any novel) to be true then you’re gonna need to have passionate arguments with yourself.
personally, i don't think covid fiction has been very interesting because of the structural barriers keeping working class people out of publishing. those of us who actually stepped up to the task of keeping society together during those panicked early months don't have the institutional support to tell our stories, which in my opinion are much more complicated and interesting than those of the work-from-zoom class whose lifestyle we supported.
I agree with you in the complexity of something like the trauma we have endured as a collective since COVID came on the scene. But from personal experience I would add that we need to get THROUGH COVID and all the death and illness that continues to plague us (in all senses of the word) before we can hope to have the distance to write and consume written content ‘about’ it … as if it’s some contained event that we are through and done with forever. There is currently another surge and we are seeing very sick people and people dying at higher rates again. I think Americans especially, have such a need to be done with unpleasantness that we develop this faux amnesia - which is only covering the trauma it is to watch millions of our family, friends, neighbors and strangers die over the course of just a few years. And we know it isn’t over and yet very few people take quick, easy home tests to make sure their ‘summer cold’ isn’t COVID. And get prickly when I say that more information can only help everyone. It helps you get the best treatment possible and it helps protects other human beings. We have proven, tested, effective vaccines but extremely sub par rates of vaccinations in nursing homes and other places where the most vulnerable coexist. And booster vaccination rates targeted at the current variants are abysmal. Causing sicker people and more unnecessary death.
I personally am still ‘in it’ and definitely need not only a skilled author or poet or moviemaker- but time and distance - to unravel and explore the complexities of this trauma which has been both extremely personal and absolutely universal.