Adam Gopnik reviews “2020: One City, Seven People, and the Year Everything Changed,” by Eric Klinenberg, and “Fourteen Days,” a collaborative novel written by many hands, including Dave Eggers, John Grisham, Erica Jong, Celeste Ng, Ishmael Reed, and Meg Wolitzer.
Writing the history of an event that happened generations ago is difficult enough. Writing about an episode that happened five minutes ago is hard in another way. Who knows what counts and what doesn’t? Yet 2020 already seems historic—how remote so many of its rituals now feel, from the Lysol scrubbing of innocent groceries to the six-feet rule of social distancing. Andrew Cuomo and Joe Exotic, both superstars of the first pandemic months, have been banished from attention.
Klinenberg’s own figure on the pandemic ground is that America’s exceptionally poor handling of the crisis exposed the country’s structural selfishness: our political culture and institutional habits tell people that they’re on their own. Other countries, he writes, “experienced a spike in generalized anxiety when the pandemic started. Their lockdowns were extensive. Their social gatherings were restricted. Their borders were sealed. Their offices were closed.
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