two pandemic novels( NYT)

 

Fiction A New Novel by Louise Erdrich Haunted by Covid and George Floyd’s Death Set in Minneapolis mostly during 2020, “The Sentence,” by the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, is a ghost story about America’s current traumas that also evokes those of our collective past. By Malcolm Jones

Fiction Locked Down With Friends, Lovers and Rivals, in Gary Shteyngart’s New Novel The characters in “Our Country Friends” retreat to a Hudson Valley estate, but the virus and the world are at their heels. By Dana Spiotta

Dear Reader,

Is there such a thing as the pandemic novel? Two new books suggest that the tumult of 2020 offered plenty of fodder. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and Minneapolis bookstore owner Louise Erdrich looks at what happens when the ghost of a bookstore’s most annoying customer haunts it over the course of the year in question. (Weren’t we all a little haunted that year?) Malcolm Jones reviews her novel “The Sentence.” And Gary Shteyngart’s “Our Country Friends” looks at a pandemic bubble of friends, and the romantic and platonic entanglements that develop as they live out a version of Chekhov on the Hudson. Our reviewer is Dana Spiotta, author most recently of the novel “Wayward.”