Portside

The story is full of very relatable pandemic moments: workers questioning whether it’s safe to go to work or whether they should stay home, streets suddenly emptied, N-95 masks. What makes this all so remarkable is that it was published in 2018...

Journalist Lawrence Wright brings his considerable skills to bear in this novel about a pandemic, written before our current crisis erupted.

We’re not living in the dystopias of George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, the author insists, but in the shifty algorithmic universe of Philip K. Dick, where the world that the Internet and social media shape is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. In this view, it’s a world in which technology is developing in ways that fudge the difference between the human and the artificial.

Erdrich takes up the genre of literary dystopia in a manner that is focused, writes reviewer Goodman, "on the agency of women and the centrality of procreation and pregnancy in the way they are treated by society."