In an essay from her collection, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett shares how she learned one of her tried and true lessons for writing fiction from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Written in 1924, this novel documents an impressionable young man’s prolonged stay in a tubercular sanatorium in the Alps where he meets patients and doctors of varied nationalities who profess diverse philosophies of life. While reading this novel in high school, Ann Patchett first recognized that a book’s plot doesn’t have to be complex. As in her novel The Dutch House, there is something revealing about simply placing characters all in one place and letting them interact.
Like Ann Patchett, I also fell under the spell of the contemplative pace of The Magic Mountain as it exposed deeper moral themes while introducing characters who represented a microcosm of life in Europe just before the devastation of WWI. The central character, Hans Castorp, extends an initially brief visit to see a sick relative into an eventual seven-year stay. This gives Thomas Mann plenty of time to document the daily interaction between characters in this remote tuberculosis treatment hospital.
Last week I finished another book that analysed human interaction in a confined setting. Just as The Magic Mountain presents a microcosm of pre-WWI Europe, Alexandr Solchenitzn’s Cancer Ward (1968) presents a similar slice of life, this time in post-WWII Soviet Russia. Like Solchenitzn, the main cancer patient Oleg Kostoglotov previously spent years in a labour camp and then lived in exile because of his “counter-revolutionary” activity. Other patients in his ward were all affected, for better or worse, by Stalin’s political repression of 1936-38. Now all must face their morality as they face their mortality. They trade their stories. We learn about Russia’s historical social trauma through their fears, boasting, and regrets.
The Magic Mountain takes place in a tuberculosis retreat. Cancer Ward finds meaning in lives undergoing rudimentary radiation against a common enemy; insidious cancer cells. Now, the world is facing the unbridled spread of the coronavirus.
In the United States, our hospitals are filling up with characters brought together by their exposure. Who are they? Let’s examine the CDC data which outlines the social determinants (income, occupation, housing, discrimination) that lead to health inequities, and raises the risks of Covid-19 infection and hospitalization.
While Black and Latinx represent only 13% and 18% of the U.S. population respectively, they disproportionately) provide essential public services (43% essential workers nationwide are non-white). They contribute to this workforce in even higher percentages in urban virus hot spots (75% essential workers in NYC are non-white).
Will this coronavirus ward house more Republicans than Democrats? A Pew Research report in late June found that 7 out of 10 Americans say masks should be worn in public places, but that Democrats/Leaning Democrats are twice as likely as Republicans/Leaning Republicans to say that masks should always be worn publicly. Could these partisan views affect the eventual composition of these COVID-19 floors?
Whatever the final composition, it’s clear that this pandemic offers a new potential setting for the next novel in this series of convalescence inspired literature. Sick Americans, each with their own unique story to tell, are being brought together under common duress to interact with and learn from each other. Perhaps the new novel will be called The Pandemic Mountain or COVID Ward. Who will be the Nobel Prize caliber writer to first write this next classic? If no current Nobel Prize for Literature authors are available, I’d take Ann Patchett in a pinch. Step forward please...we need to gather some meaning out of this trauma.