September 11 didn’t feel like ancient history by the time Martin Amis published The Last Days of Muhammad Atta in 2006 or Don DeLillo’s Falling Man came out in 2007. Yet – at least as a subject for fiction – the onset of the pandemic in spring 2020 already has that air. It’s partly because novelists were so quick to respond, from Ali Smith to Sally Rooney to Elizabeth Strout and more besides. It’s partly, too, that fictionalising those events doesn’t require the bravado Amis mustered when he sought to get inside a hijacker’s mind; we’ve all been living through Covid. Do we want to go back – again – to how it began?
Yes, say the authors of two new novels that adopt contrasting narrative approaches to that period as experienced in New York. In Day, by Michael Cunningham (author of Pulitzer-winning The Hours), a middle-aged couple is riven by everyday discord over three consecutive Aprils, from 2019 until 2021. Dan’s rock star dreams have given way to househusbandry while magazine editor Isabel finds her daily commute fuels fantasies of giving up life to work as a diner waitress. Pushed and pulled in their wake are their two children, 10-year-old Nathan and five-year-old Violet, as well as Isabel’s brother and lodger, Robbie, whose willingness to pitch in with the kids won’t stop him getting the boot when she and Dan want a bigger home.
Family tensions, already swollen by each individual’s sense of being thwarted in their desires, ratchet up once the pandemic hits, at which point the penny drops as to why we needed to hear so much so early on about one character’s underlying health condition. Usually Cunningham’s touch is lighter: at one point, we see Isabel warm to Dan’s new-found glow, before a later passage from Dan’s perspective lets slip the cause (cocaine). But while the novel is always tender and sympathetic, humour is generally thin on the ground. Instead, you sense anxiety about whether these people even merit attention. Isabel considers her woes “unprofound… white lady problems”, while Dan wants to ask his son if he thinks “even fleetingly, about how much has been done for you, along with the birth gifts themselves: white and healthy and smart… Do you get it that .00001 per cent of 10-year-old boys get any of this, never mind all of it?”
The burden of that unvoiced question weighs heavier once Nathan’s private struggles take centre stage in a climactic third act, fuelled by a Covid death that prompts agonised doubt over the source of infection. In the end, the novel emerges as a subtle portrait of the emotional and psychological strife that can be passed down the generations when politics are shaped by guilt rather than action.
Cunningham’s use of the virus as an accelerant for family drama – not dissimilar to the blueprint of much post-9/11 fiction – might be seen as the kind of faintly hokey neatness that Sigrid Nunez resists in digressively conversational novels such as The Friend and What You Are Going Through, books respectively about suicide and euthanasia that double as endlessly elastic vessels for the silt of consciousness.
In The Vulnerables, set in New York in spring 2020, she brings the narrative formula into the Covid era. A Nunez-like writer finds herself housesitting for travelling friends who, stranded by lockdown, need someone to look after their pet parrot after the sudden departure of their previous housesitter, a young college dropout with a history of mental illness. The action turns on his equally sudden reappearance and the odd couple negotiations that result from two strangers suddenly sharing the same space amid the fear of infection. But the novel’s texture resides chiefly in the flow of thought as the narrator’s mind roves over, among other subjects, a friend who dropped dead from a brain tumour, why it’s considered bad form to open a novel with a description of the weather, and the trustworthiness of Joan Didion.
Portraying unlikely connection under the pressure of isolation, Nunez uses her central duo to highlight problems faced during the pandemic by young and old alike, as her neutrally all-encompassing title suggests. As a reading experience, it’s intimate and immersive, yet often dry in its use of a determinedly nonfictional tone. While she’s not above a dose of jeopardy – not least when the narrator, out on one of her regular walks, gets menacingly coughed at by a scary cyclist – there are lines such as: “Before we leave the water, I want to quote another sea diver and documentary film-maker”, a sentence uttered after four pages of reflection on Craig Foster’s film My Octopus Teacher, and not one obviously belonging in a novel. Forty pages from the end, you’re expecting some kind of tension, but the narrator is instead listing search results as she and her fellow housesitter are sitting six feet apart Googling the origins of the word “sundae” and the phrase “raining cats and dogs”.
A novel can be whatever it wants to be, but you sense special pleading for Nunez’s artistic choices when the narrator declares: “Growing consensus: the traditional novel has lost its place as the major genre of our time… Perhaps what is wanted in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact.”
Hasn’t Trump got enough to answer for without copping flak for the rise of anti-novelistic autofiction? Reading these novels together left me
eyeing the middle ground between melodrama and musing, between the straitjacket of plot and the laxity of anything-goes essayism.
• Day by Michael Cunningham is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
• The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez is published by Virago (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
