3 Defining Novels of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Malavika Kannan is the author of Unprecedented Times, out today from Holt. Below, she recommends three defining novels about the Covid-19 pandemic. The Vulnerables by Sigrid NunezI am a lifelong Sigrid Nunez superfan. The Vulnerables was one of the first wave of COVID-19 novels that I read while still drafting my own, and I enjoyed Nunez’s depictions of the small details and internal crises of life in early lockdown. Nunez’s writing illuminated, for me, the widening fault lines in internet-age American society that predated but were turbo-charged by the pandemic: the mutual incomprehensibility and hostility along lines of gender, race, and generation that ha e come to characterize our politics. Nunez’s protagonist is a cautiously conservative, aging female writer who finds herself puzzled and threatened by the surging social mores of the younger generations. In fact, Nunez’s protagonist ends up quarantining with companions who include, per the book’s description, “an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot.” The concern and bewilderment that Nunez’s generation exhibits towards my generation made me interested in exploring the psychological impacts of COVID-19 on younger Americ...