Plague Journal, Day 65: Constructing a plague fiction syllabus

I’ve read no novels in CoronaWorld. I’m not sure why. Heaven knows there’s plenty of news to track, much of which feels essential to my health, my status as a citizen. 

But I can’t defend the hours I’ve spent on the Games section of The New York Times:  crosswords, sudoku, KenKen, spelling bee (“How many words can you make with 7 letters?”). Without question, many of the hours spent on social media have impaired my mental health. 

Mostly I’ve shied from the commitment required of a novel, which can take days of sustained attention. My attention feels — not just fragmented, shattered. I’ve picked up poetry on occasion; essays have given succor. But, though the book group I joined just Before CoronaWorld is now plunging into Jane Austen’s oeuvre, I’m unconvinced by those who argue her heroines have much to tell us at this moment. 

Let me refine that: in any moment Austen, or any great novelist — Twain, Tolstoy, Mann, Morrison, Garcia Marquez, and on — will tell us things from which we can profit. Telling of individuals moving through a society that restrains, comforts, directs, confuses, rejects them; sketching characters whose traits and quirks refresh our sense of humanity; making fine ethical distinctions: a profound novel can always edify. (I mean this not in the 18th-century sense in which novels were to instruct in virtue; it applies equally to readers seeking escape, pursuing “art for art’s sake.”)  Austen joined Trollope, James, Pynchon, others in providing hours of succor and insight during my months and years of cultural confusion in Indonesia.  

But in CoronaWorld I’m searching, I think, for something more specific: not just how to be a person, but how to live now, during a plague. I feel the bonds of society fraying. Perhaps it’s my hours on social media, but I’m seeing the reeling shadows of indignant desert birds. The coming election feels like I imagine did 1932’s, after which FDR and a Democratic Congress navigated through the Scylla of nativist fascism and Charybdis of Soviet-style socialism. In 2020? 

Orhan Pamuk, it turns out, is writing a plague novel. He penned an essay for the Times headlined as if about “pandemic novels” but in fact a quick historical treatise on plagues themselves, as well as a charge to “embrace and nourish the feelings of humility and solidarity engendered by the current moment.” Fair enough. 

Other than a one-word nod to Camus (“The Plague,” 1947) Pamuk mentions only two plague novels. One: Defoe’s “Journal of a Plague Year” (1722), an account of the 1665 Great Plague of London, which struck when Defoe was 5 years old and killed as many as one in five Londoners. His uncle, apparently, kept a contemporaneous account, and Defoe used it and others to fill the novel with journalistic detail: statistics; specific churches, streets, and pubs; gossip; and, most notably, weekly mortality bills, which chart the virus’s spread through various parishes. 

Two, and new to me (embarrassingly, since apparently every Italian schoolchild knows it): Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed” (1827), which Pamuk says is “perhaps the most realist novel ever written about an outbreak of plague.” Even if we grant this assessment, Manzoni covers the topic — the Great Plague of Milan, 1629-31, which killed one in four Milanesi — in but three chapters of a sweeping, three-volume, 38-chapter tale. 

Which leaves the question: Given the frequency with which plagues have disrupted civilization, why so few great works of fiction on the theme? 

I’m constructing a “Novels Of The Plague” syllabus, a list of books I hereby pledge to complete over the next couple of semesters. This is the opposite of exhaustive; I welcome all suggestions. I’m less interested in science-fiction novels set in a plague’s aftermath, of which there are plenty; I’m more interested in reading of characters navigating pandemics themselves. Here’s my opening list: 

“Journal of a Plague Year,” Daniel Defoe (1722)

“The Last Man,” Mary Shelley (1826)

“The Betrothed,” Alessandro Manzoni (1827)

“The Painted Veil,” Somerset Maugham (1925)
"The Plague," Albert Camus (1947)

“Doomsday Book,” Connie Willis (1992)

“Year Of Wonders,” Geraldine Brooks (2001)

“The Last Town On Earth,” Thomas Mullen (2006)

“Severance,” Ling Ma (2018)

“The Last Hours,” Minette Walters (2018)

“Nights Of A Plague,” Orhan Pamuk (2020)

I start, randomly, with “Station Eleven,” Emily St. John Mandel (2014). The Girlfriend just read it, recommended it highly. Some reviewers categorize it as “science fiction;”  the author herself does not. I pick it up Saturday night, get through its opening section before bed. It starts as a piece of realistic fiction, describing in swift, deft prose a Toronto paramedic helping a man stricken with a heart attack, then a group of stunned witnesses drinking afterward in a bar. The second scene ends with this paragraph: “Of all of them there at the bar that night, the bartender was the one who survived the longest. He died three weeks later on a road leading out of the city.” 

Then, a few pages later, the paramedic is "crushed by a sudden certainty that this was it, that this illness Hua was describing was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life."

The words resound in my brain, heralding the thing I seek: Plague fiction! 

(New York state numbers on Saturday: 350,121 diagnosed with Covid-19, up 0.5 percent; 141 dead, to a total of 22,619, up 0.6 percent. Overall U.S. deaths: 1,231, to a total of 82,654, up 1.5 percent.)