The hero of Social Distancing, Fred Traubert, is a former academic. This implies that he wrote a doctoral dissertation, and this dissertation would have to include (probably as its first chapter) what is known as a “review of literature” – that is, a review of scholarly publications related to the topic of the dissertation. Even though Social Distancing is a work of fiction, I believe that a brief review of the literature that somehow relates to it would be a worthwhile exercise.
I’m going to start with what are known in the business as “comp titles.” When you’re writing query letters to publishers and agents, you are supposed to compare your own manuscript to a few recently published books that made some kind of splash. This doesn’t mean that you actually liked those books, or that they are very similar to your own. Basically, comp titles are successful books that have some kind of thematic link to your own book.1
In query letters, I mentioned two comp titles by name. The first is an excellent book that seems to have already acquired something like contemporary classic status: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. Granted, the situation in Social Distancing is not nearly as dire as the one depicted in Station Eleven. The former is about a character who takes precautions because he fears a coming catastrophe; the latter is about picking up the pieces after the catastrophe has happened. But there are some interesting thematic links. In Station Eleven, after a pandemic has wiped out most of the world’s population, a musical-theatrical ensemble travels nomadically around the Great Lakes region, performing at one decaying, depopulated town after another (no, Roverton is not one of them). It’s part of a conscious effort to keep civilization from dying out, which harmonizes with Fred’s belief (more like a vague hope) that his Great Lakes town can serve as a kind of civilizational refuge. Fred eventually has to deal with his own catastrophe, but it turns out to be small and local, in contrast to Mandel’s worldwide pandemic. Another point in common between the two books is that they both end in a spirit of cautious, fragile optimism.
My other comp title was Hari Kunzru’s 2020 novel Red Pill. To be frank, I didn’t like it very much, but it did have some notable parallels to Social Distancing. As a curious coincidence, at the beginning of the respective narratives, both Fred and Kunzru’s unnamed narrator make a remark about how you know middle age is upon you. Other parallels include the “German-ness” of the story (Red Pill is mostly set at an institute in Berlin, while Fred Traubert is a former professor of Germanic languages); the sense of dread or anxiety that hangs over much of the story; and the role played by neo-reactionary or “alt-right” ideologies, something that Kunzru takes with dead seriousness, but which I play mostly for laughs.2
Those are the comp titles; what of the actual influences? Let’s start with American small-town literature, something with a long and rich history. There are of course notable classics, like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and numerous works by the likes of Hemingway and Faulkner, as well as later writers like Raymond Carver, Marilynne Robinson, and Richard Russo. A lot of this material lurked somewhere in the back of my mind as I was writing; but the small-town book that probably had the strongest impact was a curiosity by a writer best known for his highly literate science fiction: Peace by Gene Wolfe. It is apparently his only novel that can be considered realistic, though one has to be careful with these labels – it may in fact be a ghost story, or some kind of fantasy. The difficulty in ascertaining what’s actually going on in this book, which is presented as the reminiscences of an old man living in a fictional Midwestern town called Cassionsville, is part of the attraction. As in Social Distancing, the hero, one Alden Weer, lives mostly in isolation, brooding and ruminating over past events; like Roverton, the town of Cassionsville comes across as a character in itself. In Peace, the boundary between fantasy and reality is a thin one, and often uncertain; in Social Distancing, Fred’s attempts to establish facts and distinguish between true and false dangers in an uncertain world are probably an echo of this.
I can’t move on from the small-town theme until I’ve mentioned one piece of travel writing: Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent. This book, centered around a quest to find the perfect American small town, records Bryson’s bumbling, serendipitous pursuit of his goal, packed with humor even when he’s being tasteless or obnoxious. In keeping with the travel-writing spectrum I described in my review of Blue Highways (“clueless and naïve travelers whose shortcomings provide grist for (usually comical) entertainment”), Bryson definitely tends toward the more naïve end, while providing enough nuggets of information to orient the reader.
Beyond this, and mentioned in both query letters and the book description on the publisher’s site, is the influence of what I call “the Central European tradition of essayistic fiction.” By “Central European,” I was thinking of authors like Musil, Kundera, and Sebald, who worked essayistic meditations and asides into their narratives. In retrospect, I realize that this isn’t a specifically Central European characteristic; British and American authors from Fielding to Melville to Dreiser to Bellow did much the same thing. It’s possible I associated it with Central Europe because Fred Traubert is a Germanicist, and it would be natural for him to be influenced by authors from that region. But more generally, I do believe it is an approach that has gone out of fashion in the contemporary milieu where so many writers have MFA degrees, and where cinematic immediacy and the “show don’t tell” rule are almost considered mandatory. Nonetheless, I believe it’s a very justifiable approach if done well: sometimes, it’s a good idea to go ahead and tell.
I should point out a curious thing: neither book was an influence on me in any significant way. I read both of them after I finished the first draft of Social Distancing, so strictly speaking they are not influences, only comp titles. Indeed, when I read these books, one of my reactions was a sense of relief that they were quite different from mine, despite the obvious parallels. At the very least, it made me think I had latched on to a larger trend without really knowing it.
One reason I didn’t like Red Pill is due to a premise that I found scarcely believable: that a Netflix-style entertainment company would hire someone with a neo-reactionary, indeed highly racist, outlook to write and produce a popular TV series. Crazy things happen in this world, but that was one pill I couldn’t swallow: a crime drama created by someone with the views of David Duke would be canceled before it could even be canceled, so to speak. In and of itself, however, it suggests a possible avenue for satire, an opportunity not seized.