Panpocalypse

Moore (The Not Wives) offers an evocative if undercooked story of New York City at the onset of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Orpheus, a 47-year-old poet who’s lived in the city since her early 20s, buys a bike before they sell out across the city, maxing out her credit card to do so. Her idea is to go somewhere, anywhere besides staying indoors. She bides her time cultivating a pod with a trans man and having “text fights” with a pre-pandemic lover, all the while hoping vestiges of the city as she knew it will survive. Orpheus’s loneliness is made palpable and expertly portrayed in short chapters that feel like diary entries; she resolves to “put the world in the book,” and Moore doesn’t miss a step, chronicling Orpheus’s involvement in protests against police violence after the murder of George Floyd. The short chapters can waver, especially when Moore drifts between recent events and unflagged flashbacks to Orpheus’s childhood. Some of the accounts of 2020 feel unprocessed and lacking in perspective, but Moore shines when channeling readers’ collective fears for the future. It’s a little slight, but it works as a pandemic time capsule. (Mar.)

Correction: an earlier version of this review misidentified some of the members of Orpheus’s pod and incorrectly stated that the novel involved the All Cops Are Bastards movement.