Greetings from the Upper West Side, where the skies are grey, the Trader Joe’s is basically a cut scene from Mad Max: Fury Road, and I am officially quarantined due to - you guessed it - symptoms resembling a mild case of Miss Rona herself. I’m okay, though! Seriously, don’t worry about me. Whatever I have is unpleasant but does not seem to be life-threatening, and I’m not going to go out and try to get tested if it means I could potentially expose someone at much higher risk of having serious complications. In the meantime, I haven’t left my apartment since I started to feel sick on Tuesday night, and I won’t be leaving for the foreseeable future. All of this is to say that I have absolutely nothing but time on my hands to plow through books and tell you what I think you should read right now.
While I’ve seen quite a few requests and lists online for pandemic and apocalypse-themed fiction these past couple weeks, I think Amina Cain’s haunting debut about a museum janitor yearning for the freedom and agency she observes in the upper class makes for as compelling a read in our current climate as you could ask for. Indelicacy is a haunting exploration of what it means to be a woman with precise ambitions but not the means with which to achieve them. Vitória, our narrator, has worked low-wage jobs since her tween years, dreaming of a time when she will be free to pursue her one goal of writing and publishing a book. But while a marriage of convenience to a wealthy man frees her from the day-to-day anxieties about money and pains of manual labor, she finds that she’s no freer as a kept wife than she was as a cleaning woman. This is a novel that asks what it really means to be independent - and why independence, for women, often takes a very different form than it does for men.
The unhappiness of married women, and the constraints felt by wealthy married women specifically, are not new topics in fiction. But Cain digs into Vitória’s inner life unsparingly, touching on the loneliness she feels due to her leap in social class in elegant prose. She aches to befriend her husband’s maid, Solange, who rebuffs her attempts at conversation; she’s intimidated by the other wealthy women at her ballet classes and struggles to make new friends in her own social circle; she’s ashamed to be seen by acquaintances from her previous life, fearing their judgment. It’s a tremendous exploration of the uncertainty that accompanies women’s upward mobility, especially when that mobility and security is tied to a man, and the unbearable sense of isolation that comes along with it. It’s about how deeply sex and misogyny are tied into independence, and how even women who are able to escape their material circumstances and make that leap up to a stable, financially secure life through marriage are still no more independent than they were before.
I read this book a few weeks back, but returned to it this week after reading this article in the New York Times about the janitors tasked with cleaning and sanitizing office buildings right now. The past two weeks have been an unprecedented, uncertain, and scary time in America, and as we head toward what appears to be a shutdown of non-essential services here in New York, I’ve found myself unbelievably angry at how little humanity we extend to the workers who are somehow deemed both “unskilled” and “essential.” If you’re in a position to do so, please look for ways you can financially help out the people in your community who have no choice but to put themselves at risk right now. Tip extra, donate, whatever you can do. Even if you can’t, it’s your prerogative to show kindness and gratitude if you do have to venture out into the world right now. It’s the least you can do.
Indelicacy is available everywhere from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, who were kind enough to provide me with this copy.
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink
Five Days at Memorial, based on Sheri Fink’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting on the doctors and nurses on duty at New Orleans’ Memorial Medical Center during Hurricane Katrina and the days that followed, was published in 2013. But even if you’ve already read it, I cannot recommend revisiting it strongly enough. Fink delves deeply into the ethical quandaries faced by those practicing medicine in unprecedented circumstances, as well as the structural inequities exposed in times of crisis. There are few real “right” answers provided in these pages, but Fink’s reporting takes pains to provide context for every decision made by the staff at Memorial, leaving it mostly up to the reader to decide where they fall on the moral questions raised here.
The first half of this book is a grippingly detailed account of the circumstances that contributed to the tragic outcomes at Memorial - from the deep racism, class inequity, and general bureaucratic mismanagement that led to New Orleans being essentially abandoned by the federal government after Katrina, to the situational ethics and moral dilemmas unique to disaster medicine. But Fink takes pains to tell the individual stories of both patients and practitioners as well, and the wealth of personal detail is what makes this book such an effective retelling of a tragedy.
Suffice it to say, this isn’t a fun, inspiring read right now. But as the severe institutional failures that have rendered our governments and hospitals unprepared for a true pandemic come to light, I think it’s essential reading for anyone struggling to make sense of how we ended up here and where we’re going.
Five Days at Memorial is available everywhere, and - funny story - I originally bought it myself because Ryan Murphy at one pointed intended to make it the basis for the third season of American Crime Story, but eventually scrapped the premise altogether. I wonder whether he’s re-evaluating that decision right now.
One more thing: where should you get your books in a pandemic?
Earlier this week, Olga Khazan at the Atlantic confirmed the first known case of coronavirus at an Amazon warehouse, and it’s safe to say that more aren’t far behind. (Disclosure: Khazan has a book coming out at my imprint, Hachette Books, in April.) Between the risk of exposure and Amazon prioritizing deliveries of food and other essential household goods, I’ve seen a number of folks discussing where it’s best to buy books right now.
Y’all, there has never been a better time to support indie bookstores - any indie bookstores! Amazon will be fine, but independent booksellers are facing much higher stakes. Josh Powell at Publishers Weekly lists 10 ways to support your favorite indie, and there are more resources at BuzzFeed, including ways to donate to booksellers who have been laid off. Many indie bookshops are offering curbside pickup or local delivery, as well as discounted shipping. Hello Hello Books and The Ripped Bodice are offering care packages for yourself or someone else. If you’re facing financial hardship yourself, Scribd is offering 30 days of free ebooks and audiobooks, and many local libraries are taking advantage of publisher discounts on digital content right now.
Or, if there’s something you absolutely cannot wait to read and have no choice but to buy through Amazon, just buy it as an ebook. It’s just common sense.