In the giant hamster ball

Three Coronavirus novels for your consideration.

Early in the pandemic when I could still concentrate I read Lawrence Wright's The End of October about a global pandemic as told by an epidemiologist. The fictional doctor's explanations and musings helped me get a grip on the terminology and the workings of our nonfiction virus. Over half a year later, I mainly remember the description of the U.S. vice president placed in a giant hamster ball to keep him safe from the virus, and to protect the succession of power. 

There are many persons of power and influence I've wanted to put in giant hamster balls this year, more for my protection than theirs.

Year of Wonders, by Geraldine Brooks, considers the social aspects of a 1666 pandemic. How could a small village stop the spread of Bubonic plague to the rest of the country? How could the residents not destroy each other in the process? Told by a young widow who becomes a midwife and later n a healer, this is satisfying historical fiction with cautionary tales for our time. Rather than become a superspreader, the village self-quarantines at the urging of a popular pastor, but the experience brings out the worst in the residents' natures. The need to blame, to spread fake news, to hunt witches, and the struggles between religion, superstition, and science resonate in 2020.

The Silence, by Don DeLillo, is a very short, spare novel about a different cataclysm, a different type of disease, an existential epidemic that could happen any day now.

On Super Bowl Sunday 2022 an unexplained event makes screens go dark, and airplanes fall from the sky with no flight control, no technology. No media can bring an instant 24/7 news blitz about the cause, because there's no media. The novel is the best dark DeLillo distilled down almost to poetry. 

To paraphrase artist Paul Klee, science explains the visible, but fiction makes visible.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

© 2013-2020 Nancy L. Ruder