Today is Monday, February 21, 2022, Presidents’ Day. The holiday dates back to the 1880s and it used to always be held on February 22, which was George Washington’s birthday, which is tomorrow. The day was a federal holiday, meaning that there was no mail today and banks were closed. Federal government offices and state offices were closed in observance of the holiday. School is out for Midwinter Recess. My Astoria friend, “Seth,” must be overjoyed since he’s home this week.

Since it’s getting late here, I have decided to forgo writing about the usual run of political stories vying for our attention to concentrate on a different sort of article that appeared in today’s New York Times about the effects of the coronavirus on the writing community and how some very well-known writers have tackled writing about the grim subject that has occupied us for two years already and those who might steer clear of writing about it at all because of how readers might react to reading about events that hit too close to home. The very intriguing article is called Writers Wonder If People Want to Curl Up With a Covid Novel,” by Alexandra Alter, and it examines this phenomenon of writing COVID novels when we are still in the midst of it.

Alter begins her article by describing a novel by Sigrid Nunez that predated our current coronavirus pandemic, but eerily captured many of the features relating to it in her novel from 12 years ago called Salvation City. It is the story of a boy whose parents die from a mysterious respiratory ailment. In the book, she described “a near-future America that seemed like a far-off dystopia, one where a rapidly spreading virus upends society, as schools close, supplies of hand sanitizer and surgical masks dwindle, understaffed hospitals run out of ventilators, and new viral variants emerge, causing infections to surge and recede in waves.” Pretty amazing, don’t you think? It would seem from the description of the novel’s theme that Ms. Nunez either took a trip to the future of 2020 in some wild way or had a crystal ball that predicted the ravages caused from our present pandemic in her living room.

Now the writer is actually writing a second novel about the current health care crisis in which a woman living in New York during the first wave of coronavirus infections starts to unravel from the unrelenting fear and uncertainty. About incorporating elements of the pandemic in her second novel, Nunez said, “It seemed too soon to be writing about the pandemic, which we were living through, but it also seemed hard to be writing about anything else.” She added, “If it’s set now, it has to be part of the story.”

Those writers who have tackled writing about the subject – like Anne Tyler, Ian McEwan, Isabel Allende, Louise Erdrich, and Roddy Doyle – are exploring the emotional and psychological ramifications of the pandemic. Many of these new projects “seek to capture the texture of daily life in the COVID era: the corrosive effect of isolation, the tedium and monotony of lockdowns and quarantines, the strain on relationships, the way the virus changed casual interactions, and ripped some families apart and brought others together.”

The dilemma associated with writing about the pandemic this early is that some writers worry about losing their audience if a pandemic plot line is incorporated in their works, but ignoring it might feel too jarringly unrealistic. There is also the problem of how to make staying home and doing nothing into something more gripping than it already is.

One writer, Tom Bissell, advises novelists to steer clear of writing about the pandemic in an essay for The Los Angeles Times. He states, “When you have a horrible global experience in which millions of people have died, what is there to explore artistically other than the fact that it was terrible?”

Those writers who believe it is necessary to write about the virus say that fiction can provide a way to process the emotional upheaval of the past two years. One of those writers, Ian McEwan, said he had no particular desire to write about the pandemic, but considered the topic like a “giant tree trunk that fell across my path.” So his forthcoming book, Lessons, follows a British man from the 1940s to his twilight years in 2021, when he’s living alone in London during lockdown, reflecting on his life. As for including the pandemic in his writing, McEwan says, “It’s going to be in literary novels simply because there’s no way around it, if you’re writing a socially realist novel.”

Another author, Anne Tyler, has a book out next month called French Braid, which follows a Baltimore family from the late 1950s to the upheaval of 2020, when a retired couple finds unexpected bliss after their adult son and their grandson comes to live with them to ride out the pandemic. This plot seems to mirror what actually did happen during the early days of the pandemic in many families.

In Isabel Allende’s new effort, Violeta, the narrator’s life is bookended by two pandemics, the Spanish flu and the coronavirus, a “strange symmetry” that she reflects on as she’s dying in isolation. This certainly doesn’t sound like a bed of roses, does it?

Some critics are now questioning whether the pandemic could yield worthwhile literature. However, plagues have been a plot device throughout history; witness the Iliad, classics like Boccaccio’s Decameron, and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (which I have, but haven’t read yet). There is also Albert Camus’s The Plague, if memory serves me.

What is noteworthy about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 is that very little fiction was written in response to that worldwide event that killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people but left barely a mark in the literary record.

With coronavirus, that’s unlikely to happen since there has been a small but growing body of work associated with it such as Roddy Doyle’s new collection, Life Without Children, which evokes life during Ireland’s stringent lockdowns. In an interview from his home in Dublin, Doyle said that he found it comforting to put “the misery of the last two years to some imaginative use.” His stories are about ordinary people surviving the once unimaginable.

Other writers still struggle with making the coronavirus the centerpiece of their works of fiction. They say they can’t predict what life might look like in just a few years and worry that pandemic references might make their literary efforts look dated. I think they don’t have to worry about that happening, don’t you think?

Anyway, that was the gist of the fascinating article in today’s paper. I wonder if you agree with one of the positions stated here and that is the pandemic is still too fresh in our minds to want to curl up in bed to read a novel about it. Do you agree? Would you go out and buy any of the novels mentioned here anytime soon?

I will briefly write about yesterday’s wedding out in Brooklyn that was very lovely and hopefully a harbinger of better days ahead in that it evoked memories of prepandemic times in my collective consciousness. The bride and bridegroom officiated before a large crowd of family and friends.

Our mode of transportation to get to the wedding venue was the subway – both ways. The afternoon trip had no incidents to write about, but the return trip had one almost scary moment. Originally, I thought we’d take an Uber home from Union Street, but Elliot insisted on taking the R back, the same way we reached the site before 4 p.m.

Since it was late, a little near 10, the car we were riding in had a scant number of passengers. That was fine until almost everyone deserted the car before Forest Hills, except for one young man, who seemed destitute since he started to pick up things left on seats or on the floor. To make matters worse, the man started laughing to himself for no particular reason. At one time, he picked up a pen left on the seat where Elliot was sitting. Then this man thought that taking Elliot’s unsmoked cigar from his hand was okay. You see, Elliot had the cigar out while he was napping. When he felt the cigar being pulled, he woke up and gestured for the man to stop. Within seconds, the man was reaching for my Strand tote bag, whereupon I just pulled it closer to me. That’s when I began getting a little nervous, especially when we all know that the subway now is plagued by the perception of more violence being committed by homeless or mentally unbalanced individuals. I thought to myself, Here’s that moment for the two of us. We should have taken an Uber. This is when I took Elliot’s lead and walked to the back of the car to wait to get off at Forest Hills. We were not followed or accosted again. Whoo!

I anticipate people will say we were indeed foolish for not taking a car service home because of the lateness of the hour, but wasn’t there a time when one could ride the subway reasonably late and not have to fear for one’s life? I used to ride the subway after 12 years ago and not worry about being accosted. I just heard from my friend, “Harold,” tonight about some very unsettling train rides he took during the 80s in which he was approached by unsavory-looking characters.

But the main thing is that nothing did happen and we were able to get home safely after all.

Stay safe and be well.