Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, the literary world has been waiting with equal parts anticipation and dread for the inevitable pandemic book boom. There would be nonfiction explainers unpacking the bat soup versus lab leak hypotheses. There would be taut domestic thrillers about women killing their spouses under cover of COVID-19. There would be self-serious literary autofiction about having a gender crisis in lockdown. There would be, god help us, an Anthony Fauci memoir, probably featuring an absurdly large black-and-white portrait on the cover and an absurdly overwrought title such as Fauci: Unmasked, Uncensored, Unstoppable.
But more importantly, there would be love stories. Stories about marriages on the rocks under lockdown, of affairs cut short by quarantine (or worse, revealed by infection), of young people dodging the public health police in order to keep hooking up. It was impossible after all not to notice COVID-19’s impact on our romantic lives, a transformation that belied the notion that anything we used to do outside our homes could be done just as well inside of them.
Some of the bleakest examples of pandemic advertising were for the dating site Match.com purporting to show a young couple having a whole relationship, from first meeting to sleepover dates, through the intermediary of a screen (the ultimate contraceptive barrier method, to be sure). The Mayo Clinic recommended wearing masks during intercourse, which the media dutifully rereported as a fun and novel way for couples stuck at home to spice up their lockdown sex lives. It was, all told, a sad and desperate attempt to convince ourselves that this iteration of love, if not better than the real thing, was at least good enough.
Love in the Time of Contagion, the newest work of culture writing by Unwanted Advances author Laura Kipnis, is not a love story. Rather, as the subtitle says, it’s A Diagnosis, an intimate rumination on how and why we came to this dark, peculiar place. And here, the news is not good: Long before COVID-19 came to rule our lives, the seeds of loneliness were already there. Festering in our collective bloodstream, a sickness exacerbated by the pandemic but the point of origin of which goes back much further, to the moment when the internet and social media first began to change our understanding of who and what we are to each other. Long before we began to look at other people with suspicion as potential carriers of disease, our dating lives were ruled by mistrust. Defensiveness. Disgust. And fear, fear most of all, of what they might do to us, and of all the terrible things they might make us feel.
Kipnis almost certainly saw this coming, familiar as she was with the campus culture where new norms surrounding sex and intimacy often incubate before eventually bleeding out into the mainstream. Her previous book delved into the sexual McCarthyism lurking beneath the free-love veneer of hookup culture, in which heartbroken young women would seek solace, and vengeance, by ensnaring the men who’d hurt them inside Title IX’s bureaucratic house of horrors. The more traumatized you could claim to be, the greater the power you could wield, what Kipnis identifies in her new book as “vulnerability calcified into aggression.”
This dynamic is readily apparent in virtually any community where shaming runs rampant, including the Twittersphere, where America’s journalists, politicians, and other discourse leaders hung out almost constantly during the pandemic (not that we weren’t already there before). But it’s also easily glimpsed between the lines of our contemporary romantic conflicts, in which all manner of bizarre and bad behavior can be traced back to and excused by the conviction that it is both unbearable and unacceptable to have one’s feelings hurt. That’s how love became such a terrifying endeavor at the same time that trauma became such a source of power: The culture of the moment is all about maximalizing the ordinary aches and pains of a relationship into something catastrophic. Your louse of an ex-boyfriend wasn’t just a jerk or a liar but a predator; the unkind words you exchanged when you had a fight weren’t just a conflict but abuse. And the cruel disappointment of a breakup isn’t just a sad but unavoidable part of life; it’s a wound inflicted on you, the victim, by the bad person who did this to you.
“Where campus life and the larger culture converge,” Kipnis writes, “is the shared premise that sexual danger abounds in social nooks and crannies that were once mistakenly regarded as harmless.”
There’s a lot of aggressive vulnerability in the pages of this book, fueled by a variety of fears. Of heartbreak, assault, coronavirus, whatever. The point is, once you come to see yourself as being at perpetual risk of attack, you can write off even the craziest behavior as an act of self-defense. But whether we’re marinating our vegetables in bleach or stalking a lover on social media for evidence of two-timing, or even (as one of Kipnis’s friends does) cheating on an alcoholic spouse as a form of self-care, it’s clear that what we’re really afraid of is other people. We’re afraid of who they might be and what they might do. We want to get them before they get us.
An uncharitable reader might pan this book as a tired rehash of the usual culture war tropes. I can already imagine a certain variety of caustic Twitter response; “tHe rEaL viRuS wAS cAncEL cuLtURe,” someone will write, alongside a low-res image of a demented-looking SpongeBob SquarePants.
But while some of these ideas will certainly be familiar to anyone who (like me) spends too much time online, the quality of Kipnis’s writing makes them fresh and often highlights the unseen angles or unexamined side plots of stories that have long since fallen down the collective memory hole. The narrative meanders enjoyably across the topics of love, lockdowns, the #MeToo movement, and the way that the one-two punch of shifting cultural norms plus COVID-19 turned us all into screen-addicted shut-ins, scrolling all day in the hopes that someone will break up the boredom by getting canceled, not that the author is judging us.
Kipnis is in the trenches, too: acerbic, contemplative, bemused, self-deprecating, and even occasionally confessional about the uncomfortable chafing effects of lockdown on her own life, even as she artfully avoids the millennial essayist’s trap of laying oneself too bare.
Someday, a decade or so down the line, someone will write a grand history of love amid the pandemic, a 30,000-foot view of how it changed our culture and our selves. This isn’t that book, but that’s for the best: Love in the Time of Contagion is a compact little treat, both physically (its petite dimensions and bright pink cover give it the aesthetic and heft of a novelty gift) and also narratively. Though Kipnis is a college professor, this doesn’t read like a lecture from the ivory tower. It’s both more intimate and more free-associating, pinballing from topic to topic within the loose parameters of each chapter’s theme; one gets the sense of following a brilliant, slightly eccentric anthropologist around a small apartment while she talks aloud to herself. To be clear, this is a compliment.
It’s also a narrative sensibility that eerily mirrors the larger trajectory of the pandemic: There’s the sense of pleasant confinement so familiar from those early days in which lockdowns seemed like a snow dayesque refuge from the grind of daily life, when we took two weeks to flatten the curve and experiment with sourdough and do puzzles in our pajamas. There’s the surreal absurdity as the weeks turned to months, as we sank ever deeper into our couches and drifted ever further into a lifestyle dominated by Zoom happy hours, the endless churn of the outrage mill, and Wikipedia esoterica. Chapter two contains an extended riff on Harvey Weinstein, including some grotesque speculation about his scrotum and what’s the matter with it, that feels very much like the product of some late-night tumble down one of the internet’s weirder rabbit holes.
And of course, there’s the claustrophobia of the months becoming years, of the walls closing in, of wondering just how much longer we can all live like this without losing our minds, which brings us to the final chapter of her book, in which Kipnis becomes a secondhand voyeur into the love life of one of her millennial students. The student, a young woman named Zelda, is tangled up in an internecine drama involving one current squeeze and somewhere between two and five exes, all of whom are deeply ensconced in the subtweeting, screenshotting, sexual surveillance state that is (for lack of a better phrase) cancel culture. Kipnis dutifully attempts to explain the precise nature and origin of these entanglements, and the reader may dutifully attempt to follow them, but like most social media-driven conflicts between the very young and extremely online, the most striking thing about Zelda’s love life is that it’s not just messy but makes for profoundly dull reading, which may be the point. The 20-somethings in this chapter are like little agents of chaos; when they’re not digging through each other’s internet histories in search of kompromat, they’re fomenting drama on purpose in the hopes of creating some.
But why? Not because they’re sadists, but because they’re bored. The pandemic pressed pause on their lives, and two years later, they’re bouncing off the walls. We all are.
And if Love in the Time of Contagion is an apt diagnosis of the problem, then the treatment, as the kids say, might be to go outside and touch grass.
Kat Rosenfield is a culture writer and novelist.
