Perspective: What will post-pandemic fiction look like? The novels that followed 9/11 offer some clues.
Obviously, there are others, and there were allusions to the cataclysm in novels as early as 2002 and 2003. But, generally, it took novelists a little more time to shape the nightmare into a story. After all, how do you make something up when the truth is so unspeakable? So wrenching?When the first of the World Trade Center towers pancaked into the earth on Sept. 11, 2001, I was on the tarmac at Denver International Airport, seated in a plane that was about to fly to San Francisco.
The first thing I did when I was home was change the ending of my forthcoming March 2002 novel. Instead of disappointment and grief, I ended it with uplift and hope. The second thing I did was scrap the novel I was writing and begin something new. I couldn’t bear to be back in that hotel room in Denver in my mind, and so I began a different story. It wasn’t about 9/11; this was only a week and a half after the cataclysm. None of us can really make sense of history as history is occurring.
When we began to shelter in place, the social networks were awash with the idea that Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” during a plague quarantine. I’m not sure whether the point was to galvanize us or make us all just give up. The evidence I’ve read online suggests it’s possible the bard did indeed pen the great tragedy while in lockdown.Certainly, my next novel is not about covid-19 — and neither is the book after that.
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