White lady problems

Pandemic novels and a paradox.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Hello!

There is a character who keeps popping up in my writing and conversations, unbidden, in all sorts of contexts where she doesn’t necessarily belong. Her name is Emily. When I was in high school, Emily and I were in theater together. One day at rehearsal, Emily was on her way off the stage when she suddenly paused, right at the edge, and raised her arms as if she were about to break into song. “I’m so thirsty,” she said, “but I have to pee! It’s a paradox!”

Why do I keep thinking of this one moment that happened over thirty years ago?

You could say, “Sarah, that’s a good sign that you’re dehydrated.” You would not be wrong. I drink a lot of oat milk lattes.

But I choose to look deeper. If I keep thinking of the word “paradox,” then surely it’s because there’s something paradoxical on my mind.

I recently read Michael Cunningham’s latest novel, Day. The characters in Day are: Dan and Isabel, a married couple in the thirties going through a rough time in their marriage; their two children, Violet and Nathan; Isabel’s gay brother, Robbie, who lives with the couple and is helping to raise Violet and Nathan when he’s not posting on Instagram as his alter ego, Wolfe; the husband’s brother, Garth, a feckless artist; and Chess, Garth’s college friend, who has used Garth as a sperm donor and isn’t sure how much she wants him to be part of her son’s life.

Day, true to its title, is divided into three sections: morning, afternoon, and evening. But the plot stretches beyond 24 hours. The first section is the morning of April 5, 2019. The second section is the afternoon of April 5, 2020, and the final section is the evening of April 5, 2021. In this way, the novel’s structure formally represents the time-warping effect of the pandemic.

When you look back at your life in the springs of 2019, 2020, and 2021, don’t you feel a strange sense that everything changed and yet you lived the same day, over and over, for about a year? I know I do.

The characters in Day experience a range of reactions to the pandemic. Without giving too much away, I can tell you that no one comes away unscathed. The families they thought they were part of in the morning are not the same families when evening comes. Day is what you might call a “quiet” novel: with one notable exception, most of the plot points are internal and psychological. Cunningham puts his characters through changes that take place underground, for the most part, but are seismic in proportion. At the end of this relatively short book (269 pp), you feel like they’ve only just begun to understand who they are now.

Readers of Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours, a tribute to Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, will recognize this man’s remarkable ability to inhabit, in a close third person narrative, the ambivalence of the American wife. Here we have Isabel in 2019:

“She isn’t sure why this is happening. It has to do with drift, the sense that the gravitational pull isn’t holding as it once did, which has to do with Robbie moving out and with Dan’s determination to resuscitate a career that never quite existed, which everyone knows but Dan. It has to do with her ever less successful attempts to impersonate a mother. Violet knows she’s faking; how is it that only the five-year-old can see it?

And yet she is loved and looked after. Her husband gets up early to make breakfast for the kids.

She wanted this. She wanted the marriage. She wanted the kids. She wanted the place in Brooklyn, refused to worry overmuch about the mortgage payments.

She wanted the job, too. She was good at it. She strove. She outperformed others. The trick now, it seems, is to keep wanting it, the job as well as the marriage, motherhood, the stratospherically costly handbag. The trick is learning not to despise herself for her claustrophobia and disappointments.

It’s unprofound. It’s white lady problems.”

I love this passage so much. It makes me think of Grace Paley’s short story, “Wants,” which may be the best thing that anyone has ever written about a middle aged woman.

Speaking of white lady problems (which, let’s be honest, when am I not?), let’s talk about Elizabeth Strout. Her contribution to American literature of the pandemic was her 2022 novel, Lucy at the Beach, in which Lucy Barton, the narrator of I Am Lucy Barton and Oh, William! and a character in Anything Is Possible, retreats with her ex-husband, William, to Crosby, Maine (home of Olive Kittridge) to wait out COVID-19.

When the book came out, Strout told The New York Times that part of her goal in writing Lucy at the Beach was to capture the feeling of time in lockdown:

“One of the biggest conundrums was to get the sense of time,” Strout said of the grocery-washing era of 2020, when calendars went blank and sinister. “It’s like time just imploded. The sense of a day was strange and the sense of a week was even stranger, because what was a week? I wanted to get that down on the page somehow.”

Interestingly, Cunningham was actually halfway into writing a different novel when COVID-19 began to spread in the spring of 2020. He told The Guardian that he felt compelled to drop that project and start writing something new: “If he had introduced it into his work in progress, he says, it would have been like Godzilla arriving at a slightly awkward party: ‘Who expected a 50 ft tall, fire-breathing lizard? So with some regrets, I just put that one aside.’”

I started this essay with my old friend Emily, and here she comes again to point out a paradox. COVID-19 literally robbed people of time, killing millions who should have had more life. It stole months of classroom learning from children. It wrested opportunities for growth and independence from people (mostly women) who were called upon to become full-time caretakers when schools and daycares closed. It closed businesses, killed jobs, and sent back to the nest an entire generation that had just taken flight. Like Cunningham’s characters, people reevaluated their lives and found that their career, spouse, house, and/or general circumstances no longer fit their needs. Marriages unraveled. Someone coined the term “quiet quitting” to name a thing that men have been doing since the beginning of professional careers.

Paradoxically, in the midst of all that anguish and loss, the pandemic, and the lockdown orders that came with it, bestowed upon some people a gift of time. Without the hustle of leaving the home to get to an office or get kids to school, suddenly there were these pockets of time that hadn’t been there before. Some people filled them with idiosyncratic projects. I know a guy who resolved to bake the perfect croissant. I know another guy who made ranked playlists of songs from every decade since 1950. I started writing a memoir. The pandemic hobbies of 2020 are now a cliché, like “white lady problems.”

Pandemic novels like Day and Lucy at the Beach sit right at the heart of this pandemic time paradox, demonstrating how COVID-19 is different from other large-scale disasters. We get the literary response sooner, at least from some vantage points, because professional writers had time to write.

Strout and Cunningham wrote about the pandemic as it was happening, making Day and Lucy at the Beach somewhat like time capsules. Readers in the future will understand better the way that some estranged family members, thrust together, became closer, while other families experienced claustrophobia and became estranged. They’ll see, through Lucy Barton’s eyes, political tensions exacerbated when city dwellers flee to rural areas. They might even gain, through the youngest characters in Day, some insight into the way lockdown impacted the mental health of an entire generation.

I’m still thinking about how the pandemic changed my family, and because I think through novels, I hope to keep reading about it through the perspective of characters whose lives in lockdown were different from mine. I want to read a pandemic novel from the perspective of an Amazon fulfillment worker, a healthcare aide in a nursing home, an EMT, a public school teacher. I’m hoping Day and Lucy at the Beach are merely the first wave.

Other interesting things

• I’m excited that I found Bekah Waalks’ list of 7 pandemic novels in Electric Literature while I was writing this piece. Louise Ehrdrich’s The Sentence is in my to-read pile, but I hadn’t heard anything about Companion Piece by Ali Smith, who is one of my favorite living novelists.

• If you are the kind of reader who finds your next book in the New York Times obituaries, you have had quite a season. Last month, the literary world said goodbye to Paul Auster, who was a regular at a bookstore in Brooklyn where I used to work. He had enormous eyes and always looked a little startled to encounter human beings among the shelves. I didn’t work there long enough to get to know him, but my colleagues told me he was lovely. On Tuesday night, I was attending an event at Book People for Amanda Ward’s new novel when I learned (from Amanda herself) that Alice Munro had died. I have too much to say about Munro to try to cram in here, so she will probably be the subject of my next post.

• I love everything that Austin Kleon and others are posting in celebration of Steve Albini’s life and work. I especially liked this dialogue with a failed X-factor contestant. "Don’t worry about anything except making music you like. Everything else is bullshit.”

• Is it a red flag? (Jane Eyre edition). “He describes you as “poor” and “plain” while proposing to you. Not a red flag. Relationships shouldn’t be built on lies, and it is rare to find a partner willing to take that principle and fully commit to it.”

• My son and I enjoyed Simon Rich’s short story in the New Yorker this week, “We’re Not the Same, You and I,” about a middle-aged supervillain trying to make friends.

“I told you it was pointless,” Death Skull said to his wife, Jackie.

“It’s impossible to make friends after forty.”

“I do it all the time,” Jackie said.

“It’s different for guys!” Death Skull shrieked.

Bye for now!