A bleak fact of writing is that honing sentences is often far easier than honing the thoughts they convey. A corollary fact is that polished, elegant prose serves as a useful, if not always intentional, hiding place for half-baked ideas. Walter Benjamin wrote that a key element of fascism is the aestheticization of politics—the concealment of bad thinking behind bright optics. Even in fascist-free situations, the concealment principle is common enough that I have come to approach beauty and neatness in art with some skepticism.

So far, the nascent literature of the coronavirus pandemic has reinforced my distrust. Three assemblies of coronavirus-response writing—Zadie Smith’s essay collection ; ’ short-fiction compilation, ; and the mixed-genre anthology , edited by Ilan Stavans—tell me why: No one has had time to truly refine their ideas about personal life in a state of widespread isolation and existential dread, and literature, even when political, is a fundamentally personal realm. It relies on the ability to channel inner experience outward, and because no inner experience of the coronavirus pandemic could plausibly be