Not long after COVID lockdowns began in the U.S. five years ago this week, many readers and writers started to wonder, with a mix of trepidation and curiosity, what the literature about the time period would look like. Half a decade on, we now have at least a small body of work that takes on the pandemic. In some cases, the calamity serves merely as a scene-setting device; in others, it's a major plot point. As Lily Meyer writes this week, she has taken a special interest in reading these books as they've trickled out. But she's found a fairly common flaw: Many of them attempt to 'overcontrol the experience of the pandemic' by leaning on descriptions of what happened. These novels remind readers of widely promoted images of middle-class lockdown'fashioning masks out of old scraps of fabric, wiping down groceries, catching up with friends and family over Zoom'but fail to transcend these rote recitations, or to capture other experiences of the early days of the pandemic. When the...
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