Some thought covid would change literature. It has not

When the world entered lockdowns for covid in 2020, writers and critics, finding themselves with even more time on their hands than usual, wondered how the pandemic would affect fiction. Since the “Iliad”, literature has documented—and been shaped by—disease, including Daniel Defoe’s semi-fictional testimony of London during the pestilence of 1655, “A Journal of the Plague Year” (1722), and Albert Camus’s imagining of a cholera outbreak in a French-controlled Algerian city, “The Plague” (1947). Who would write the first great pandemic novel of the covid era?