There are moments in time that seem to shuttle art from one genre to another. Last spring, pandemic-related disaster novels (Ling Ma’s “Severance,” Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake”) and apocalyptic thrillers (“Contagion” and “Outbreak” spring to mind) began to take on temporary flavors of realism, adding a new jolt to the experience of reading and watching them. Web sites began churning out recommendations for end-of-the-world television shows and books that would, suddenly, feel true to life. (I watched “Contagion” twice in a single week last March, as if there were a hurricane approaching and it was the Weather Channel.) Now, after a year spent in various states of COVID-induced prostration, President Joe Biden has signalled that things in this country will resemble something like normal by July 4th. At this downward stage in the virus’s trajectory, the prospect of watching a pandemic thriller feels akin to eating regurgitated food.
The post-disaster genre, if there is one, is not as sexy as disaster art, but a book I recently discovered scratches a particular imaginative itch that we are all experiencing at the precipice of a new era. Sigrid Nunez’s “Salvation City” is a novel from 2010 that grapples with the strange and intangible fallout of a global pandemic, imagining the kind of psychological impact that such an event can have on people already prone to conspiracy and superstition. The book tells the story of Cole Vining, a teen-age boy whose family has recently moved from Chicago to a tiny town in Indiana called Little Leap. Cole’s parents are brainy liberals, and the culture shock of such a move has put a strain on their relationship. Soon, though, they’ll have bigger problems. Everyone is starting to get sick with a mysterious flu-like virus; main symptoms include fever, aches, chills, and dry cough. Children are the main vectors of this illness, and there are strict warnings posted in each of Cole’s classrooms: “What must you do if you had these symptoms? YOU MUST STAY HOME.”
The pandemic portion of “Salvation City” passes by briefly, frantically, and with unnerving accuracy to the trials of 2020. Soap and hand sanitizer are sold out; people are encouraged to elbow-bump rather than shake hands. The President falls ill but recovers. Both of Cole’s parents come down with the flu and die early on in the novel. Eventually, Cole catches it, as well, and he recovers. But, because the illness destroys memory, the reader is not privy to the specifics of Cole’s experience of being sick. When Cole gains some semblance of a normal life again, it’s as if he’s awoken from a years-long dream, with only fragments of his former identity and personality still intact. He’s been taken in by P.W. and Tracy, a fundamentalist Christian pastor and his chipper wife, who live in a tiny and heavily religious town called Salvation City. Many God-fearing residents of this town, like P.W. and Tracy, view the moment as an opportunity to save children orphaned by the pandemic and steer them toward Jesus as the Rapture approaches. Cole is one of these children, and his experience lies somewhere in the unsettling gray area between salvation and captivity.
Despite his late biological parents’ skepticism toward religion, Cole becomes a passive follower of P.W., Tracy, and Salvation City’s religious beliefs: “He became a Christian because he did not see how he could stay in Salvation City if he didn’t.” In his new environment, Cole is forced to reckon with the delusions that his community harbors. The passing of the disaster should mark a jubilant beginning of a new moment in history, but, in the minds of hard-core believers, life is filled with fresh doom. The pandemic is a sign of things to come. One family friend, a Christian-radio-show host named Boots, asserts that the human race was stricken by the flu as a “pre-Apocalyptic punishment.” To the residents of Salvation City, the flu is just further affirmation that the Rapture is on the horizon, motivating everyone in the town to continue proving their godliness.
One of the biggest questions that the coronavirus pandemic has produced is how a period of prolonged isolation, compounded by an ambient anxiety of getting sick and a physical fear of all humans, will impact the development of children and adolescents. “Salvation City” does not provide any comforting insights. Cole is a particularly startling test case—a newly orphaned teen-ager with a brain altered by a recent illness, constantly whipsawed by the forces of puberty and religion. Nunez is especially skilled at imagining just how strange it would be to form any kind of selfhood under these circumstances. (Things grow even more complicated when Cole’s hyper-educated aunt Addy swoops in to try to rescue him from P.W. and Tracy’s guardianship.) And yet, despite the murkiness that the pandemic and other outside forces have created, a kind of teen-age normalcy seems to pierce through everything. Cole’s thoughts are dominated by his crush on Starlyn, another orphan and a “Rapture child” sent by God. Like every teen-ager, Cole, at least, has the rest of his life ahead of him.
