RELAX, EVERYONE. Experts assure us that the danger has peaked, or will soon peak, and the number of new Covid novels will slowly decline. We shall move from a pandemic to an endemic phase, where fiction featuring scenes of lockdown and working from home will be no more cause for concern than another debut about a toxic relationship.
Even by the standards of our emotionally incontinent, logorrhoeic age, the Covid fiction variant has overwhelmed our bookselling services more quickly than anyone anticipated. But there is no need for drastic measures such as placing protective caps over writers’ pen nibs; the wave will pass, just as other pandemic fiction has.
Not all world-stopping diseases are equal, however. What about the others? The influenza pandemic of 1918-20, despite killing around 50 million people worldwide, has left little permanent mark on imaginative literature. Its most notable records are non-fiction, from Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (both her parents died of Spanish flu when she was six) to Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. In fiction, even the surviving strains are not widely read, such as Katherine Anne Porter’s “nearly pure autobiography” novella Pale Horse, Pale Rider and William Maxwell’s novel They Came Like Swal lows.
AIDS has fared better, with big bruising writers like Alan Hollinghurst, Colm Tóibín, Anne
