"Coronavirus: A Novel"
by Michael Barron
Here’s the plot summary.
November 2019. An outbreak of an unknown virus is sourced to a live animal market in Wuhan, China. The virus catches the attention of a young doctor who informs the governor. The doctor is told to stop spreading lies and keep his mouth shut. Meanwhile the virus spreads, killing hundreds, including the doctor who first diagnosed it. In a rush to respond to a growing epidemic, the Chinese government builds a hospital in 10 days to treat those infected, while putting the rest of the city under a quarantine lock-down. But it’s too late. The virus has spread to other parts of China and has infected foreigners who carry the virus to other parts of the world by cruise ships. By March, cases have been reported all over the world. 130,000 cases across 125 countries have been reported, with a death toll of nearly 5,000 and counting.
If this were a speculative thriller, that would be the prologue, to be followed by the introduction of characters who will eventually save humanity: a divorced, down-and-out bio-geneticist along with a spunky and alluring PhD sidekick-turned-love-interest somewhere around chapter seven.
If this were a work of science fiction, the novel would begin fifteen years after the outbreak has wiped out nearly all of humanity. It would be narrated by the leader of a ragtag group searching for a rumored city of survivors. Flashbacks and betrayals would ensue.
If this were a novel in the vein of HIV/AIDS realism, the novel would trace the infection of a couple—one who survives and one who does not—and the impact this experience has on their loved ones.
A Coronavirus novel, in theory, brings a quotidian narrative to epidemic literature. This is not a story of a select few but rather of everyone; not only lives but livelihoods. At the time of this writing, travel bans have been put in place, hospitality and retail businesses have shuttered, and some cities have gone so far as to instigate “shelter down” policies requiring people to stay home; some countries, such as Italy, have locked up home and border altogether. Presidential administrations, including this one, especially this one, are bungling up containment efforts by not making testing free. It’s enough for the human race to collectively realize its mortality.
So it’s left to the people to take matters into their own hands by washing their hands at OCD level and avoiding hugs, handshakes, and socializing altogether. University classes are operating remotely using an app called Zoom and the right to paid sick leave has been shot down by the GOP Senate. It’s enough to make you grab them by the lapels, but again, hands. Now we’re being told government stimulus paychecks are coming to all Americans. We just have to sit and wait for it. We’re going to be doing a lot of sitting and waiting. These aren’t funny times until someone cracks the first joke.
Usually a meme is the first to kick things off. Two I’ve recently seen include a Terminator Arnold Schwarzenegger showing off his cybernetic hand captioned “me after washing my hands 1000 times,” and a GIF of The Simpsons’ Chief Wiggum shooting a flu cloud before succumbing to it. “Why I am staying home,” the user who posted it wrote.
But this event is too big to remain in the province of memes. In her recent Times Op-Ed, “Someday, We’ll Look Back On All of This and Write a Novel,” essayist Sloane Crosley assures us that stories will come out of this crisis.
“The good ones will not be born of ego or competition or fear. They will slow things down. They will put the new world into sharp relief. Right now, such novels seem like an impossible luxury. But I trust we’re all taking notes. Taking notes, taking care. And we’ll see who gets to this material first.”
It's already begun to happen. In a recent Facebook post, the Israeli writer Etgar Keret took things further by posting the following micro story, translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.
“♥️♥️♥️
The COVID-20 strain of the coronavirus caught everyone unprepared. It was the first bio-internet virus. Symptoms included high fever, dry cough, and uncontrollably sending red hearts over WhatsApp. It was transmitted through emojis and saliva. Ten days after the first case was confirmed, the World Health Organization outlawed the use of emojis in text messages and emails. Responses to the ban varied. Pope Jon Paul III declared at weekly mass that the decision was a difficult but inevitable one, whereas Donald Trump, who had been elected to a third term earlier that week, responded to the controversial decree by tweeting a smiling poop emoji. At that time it was not yet known that the virus could also be spread through tweets.”
Keret wrote the story as an apology to his Dutch readers, noting that he had to cancel a trip to Amsterdam he had “really waited for” to promote his latest book. A satire born not just from fear but frustration, absurd enough for the uncomfortable chuckle.
Just to be clear, getting a deadly infection is anything but hilarious. While in India in 2005, I contracted Hepatitis A, a virus spread by contaminated food from unwashed hands. How I came to be infected is a disgusting story involving a rural food stand, a bouncy overnight bus ride, and two open windows, mine and the passenger in front of me who vomited out of his. I’ll let your imagination piece together the rest. I became so sick that for weeks my body bloated up and couldn’t hold food. Blood tests later confirmed the infection but by then I was so weak that I had to be wheel-chaired anytime I was not in bed.
Of course, Coronavirus and Hepatitis-A are not the same thing. One attacks the lungs, the other the liver, but both can bring a person’s health to the brink. A scenario where you are not dead but not quite alive and are alone.
In the past fifteen years, the internet has come to guarantee a place for human communication and commiseration. It’s not that this kind of leveling global pandemic hasn’t always been in the zeitgeist—viral apocalypses have, after all, been a bedrock of the entertainment industry—rather it’s introduced us to the meta of global coping. Since the AIDS crisis, a pandemic that not only caused many more deaths, but stigmatized an entire community, it’s heartening to see people exhibit empathy over prejudice. It’s there, of course: reports of racist slurs against Asian-Americans are rising. And it’s not hard to find people on Twitter disparaging the entire pandemic as yet another hoax foisted upon the American people by the liberal media. But for the most part, they remain on the fringe.
It’s what happens when we let fear get the best of us, but it’s our responsibility to help keep each other afloat. We could do well to be reminded of this. In Poetry Rx, the Paris Review’s advice column, someone going by Lonely COVID asked about the ambient anxiety of social distancing. “Are these the end-times we keep bracing for?” Claire Schwartz, the poet on call, responded by prescribing “On a New Year’s Eve” by June Jordan and furthered her prescription thusly: “Every avoidable harm is also an instruction for how we might better care for one another. Social distancing is isolating, yes; it is also an act of connection.”
For anyone working on the Coronavirus novel, that’s what’s to be at stake. After this boutade calms down—it will if we stay smart and patient—the fierce competition to see who gets it right first will be a welcome antidote.
Michael Barron is a writer and editor who lives in New York.
