Perhaps it’s a sign of the robustness of American literature, in contrast to our politics, that one of our writers was able to produce a patient zero of coronavirus lit before the virus itself was anything more than a twinkle in a bat’s eye.
Lawrence Wright wrote last month in The New York Times that his book is “not prophecy” but the fruit of extensive research following from a question posed to him by the filmmaker Ridley Scott, who’d just read Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 post-apocalyptic masterpiece, The Road, and asked Wright, “‘What happened?’ How could civilization become so broken?” The answers were already out there, as Wright learned from scientists, doctors, and historians. His book shows that our new reality, a surprise and a shock to most of us, is actually following a script written far in advance, with all the words and phrases that we never used six weeks ago—attack rate, viral load, cytokine storm—now part of our everyday speech.
