Reframe Your Inbox: Why I Can’t Stop Reading Pandemic Novels

Hey everyone—welcome to another edition of Reframe Your Inbox, a pseudo-semi-weekly(ish) email newsletter in which I share some meandering thoughts on politics, work, and life.

I’m considering moving this newsletter to Substack. I mention this here to ask: Have you used Substack, either as a writer/distributor or a reader? If you have, what do you think?

Here are two things this week: 1) an exploration of why I keep reading novels about global pandemics; 2) some high-quality internet content.

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FIRST THING

Over the past six months, I’ve read quite a few novels about global plagues and pandemics. Perhaps too many. First came Stephen King’s The Stand. That ended up being a little too supernatural for me (and some of the descriptions of a post-apocalyptic Boulder, Colorado, hit a little too close to home), but it got me hooked.

Next came Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Then World War Z by Max Brooks, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and The End of October by Lawrence Wright (the same Lawrence Wright who writes longform nonfiction for the New Yorker and won a Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower). There are a couple more on the Kindle already, including Justin Cronin’s The Passage and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, and more waiting in the queue, like Colson Whitehead’s Zone One.

I just can’t seem to stop reading flu fiction.

Why adopt such a bleak reading habit, especially right now? Some of it is just that I find it interesting. (Interesting subject matter: a decent reason to read a book.) But the more significant force behind this exploration of post-apocalyptic fiction is perspective. These books offer perspective about Covid-19, yes, but also a broader perspective about the impermanence of life and the fragility of civilization. They offer perspective about what actually matters (and what does not). Perspective about the difference between real reality and the narrow sliver of the world that we confuse with reality when we’re overwhelmed by distractions and daily obligations.

These books let us peek over the other side to see what a worst-case scenario might look like, before retreating back to reality with a new awareness of what’s possible. By creating worlds that are a lot like ours and tipping them on their side—sometimes subtly, other times more abruptly—these stories show how precious and how precarious our current circumstances are. Not just where we are at this particular point in our lives, but the more foundational stuff we usually don’t notice until it’s gone. Stuff like clean water on tap and electricity on demand. All of the world’s information whizzing silently and invisibly around us. Norms and expectations that hold societies together.

These books show how much worse things could get, and how easily they could get that way. That sounds pretty bleak, yet somehow these books always leave me feeling more appreciative than apprehensive. Because when they end and I return to the non-fictional world, I’m reminded that while things could easily get a whole lot worse, the pillars of society haven’t collapsed. We can still see a realistic path to the other side.

Gaining perspective is part of the whole point of reading books, especially fictional ones, so maybe I shouldn’t be surprised by what I’m learning from a deep dive into this subgenre. In any event, I’m not the only one who has picked up this particular habit. Consider two authors who have previously written pandemic novels but this year found themselves publishing non-pandemic novels in the middle of an actual pandemic: Stephen King and Emily St. John Mandel.

In an April New York Times review of King’s new book—the same review that first led me to pick up The Stand—Ruth Franklin writes, “under normal circumstances, King is the last writer I’d reach for during an insomniac night. But these weren’t normal circumstances.” For some reason, King’s stories were “exactly what I wanted to read right now.”

In a March New York Magazine profile of Mandel, Hillary Kelly explores why sales of Mandel’s 2014 book Station Eleven, in which a flu epidemic “wipes out over 99 percent of humanity,” spiked just as the coronavirus began forcing many countries into lockdown. “Inhaling a novel about a contagion that brings civilization to an end while news about COVID-19 sends hand-sanitizer sales vaulting doesn’t sound logical,” Mann writes. “But there can be something reassuring about taking in a fictional disaster in the midst of a real one. You can flirt with the experience of collapse. You can long for the world you live in right now.”

You can long for the world you live in right now. If there’s one feeling these pandemic novels have left me with, it’s this sense of longing, suffused with an appreciation of this world’s strengths and a clearer awareness of its shortcomings.

The saying goes that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it (though history seems to suggest that even if we do learn from history, we’re likely to repeat it anyway). And most of the books I read still have a lot more to do with the world as it has been and the world as it is than the world as it might become in the aftermath of a deadly virus.

But perhaps there’s a similar lesson to take from books like these: Those who don’t consider different futures may be doomed to take the present for granted.

SECOND THING

“The Dems might always be in disarray: sloppy, unwieldy, corny, off message. But the alternative—and the homogeneity, compromise, and willful blindness that accompanies it—doesn’t feel like the future. It feels, overwhelmingly, irrefutably, like the past we’ve already left behind.” That’s Anne Helen Petersen in her new(ly revamped) email newsletter, Culture Study.

“Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value.” That’s Alexandra Schwartz exploring “what the self-help gurus and their critics reveal about our times” in the New Yorker.

“I think we maybe underestimate how severe the adversity is and that people may be experiencing a normal reaction to a pretty severe and ongoing, unfolding, cascading disaster. It’s important to recognize that it’s normal in a situation of great uncertainty and chronic stress to get exhausted and to feel ups and downs, to feel like you’re depleted or experience periods of burnout.” That’s psychologist Ann Masten, quoted by Tara Haelle in the Medium publication Elemental.

“I review every letter and report that comes out of our office, which is to say that I spend a lot of time trying to get millennials to stop using words like impacted and ensure and accessible. If there is one thing I have learned in my first term in Congress, it is that these kinds of words obscure the hard realities that we confront. As in, ‘Congress must ensure that PPE is accessible to impacted workers’ boils down to: ‘Workers will get sick and die if Congress does not pass a law—and enforce it.’” That’s Congresswoman Katie Porter, quoted by Jennifer Siebel Newsom in Glamour. (I came across this piece in Brian Beutler’s newsletter. Related: my January 2018 article, “Democrats, try campaigning like human beings.”)

That’s all for this week. As always, thanks for reading.

—Adam