Choosing Our Novel: the options (plus, pitch your own!)

Hi all,

So, it’s (past) time to choose the novel that we’ll read together for the remaining weeks of class, while you work on your final projects. I’m pitching four here, and I encourage you to add your own pitches in the comments! On Thursday when class starts, we’ll take a vote & launch our discussion.

Severance, Ling Ma

This is a pandemic novel, which satisfies our desire for something that’s relevant to our current moment. It’s also a pandemic novel set in New York, and it imagines how life breaks down in the city under pandemic conditions in ways that we could both measure against the reality we’re now seeing outside our windows and also might find helpful as a place to think through the things we’re experiencing.

You can read a little more about the novel here—this might make you want to read it (it made me want to read it!).

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

This is the postapocalyptic novel that came to mind when we talked about wanting a postapocalyptic novel on our call.It’s not a pandemic novel—the event that precedes the events of the novel is an instantaneous one. The novel itself follows a survivor seeking safety (very different than Ma’s depiction of a city in the midst of the pandemic!), and it’s written in McCarthy’s characteristically very spare prose. He’s an established major American novelist, and this novel was also adapted into a movie, I believe (which would give us grist for formal interpretation).

This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz

We’ve read Diaz in the short story and the essay, and he’s made a strong impression in both forms/genres. We could also try him in the novel—well, sort of. This is How You Lose Her is a novel in short stories, a set of separate but interconnected narratives dealing with the lives and events we’ve already had a glimpse of in “The Cheater’s Guide to Love.” Yunior appears often, of course, usually but not always as narrator, and we also learn more about the other characters we’ve met or heard about in that story. Diaz’s voice and the continuity that this offers might be enjoyable and interesting to us (especially right now)

Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

The title character of this landmark novel by Virginia Woolf is a survivor of the 1918 flu pandemic. The novel itself focuses on an ordinary day in London, the life of the city both as it’s shaped by world events (the legacies of the flu and World War One, political events at the national level) and by the vividly drawn interior and social lives of the interconnected characters. Woolf is a hugely influential novelist, and Mrs. Dalloway is a hugely influential novel—once you read it, you’ll start seeing how many references there are to it. In particular, she’s an innovator in style, and while her lush, intense sentences can be complex, they also might be both really pleasurable and deeply rewarding right now.

Want to pitch something else? Chime in down below in the comments!

Ready to vote? Go here!