Tom Wilhelmus at The Hudson Review:
Seven of the following ten books have something to do with the Covid pandemic 2019–22, and the remaining three address some of the other traumas that consume our politics, and planet, during these troubled times. “Aren’t you worried?” a character in Hari Kunzru’s novel Blue Ruin asks, “I mean, about the future?” It’s a question many of us are asking.
Therefore fiction, according to one recent PBS critic, has become “more like the ’30s,” say, more sociological, and political, more immediate and content-oriented, less aesthetic, more essay-like and rhetorical. And, as Sigrid Nunez suggests, it has occasionally become more obsessed with the way truth is distorted and compromised not only in public, but also in the individual artist’s practice. Perhaps what we should want, she suggests, “in our own dark anti-truth times, with all our blatant hypocrisy and the growing use of story as a means to distort and obscure reality, is a literature of personal history and reflection: direct, authentic, scrupulous about fact,” not “fictional” but “autofictional.” Thus, “journaling” seems also to be part of the process and shows up stylistically in the product as well.[1] The old verbal icon dies, and some new kind of literary expression struggles to be born.
more here.