Amazing that Nunez wrote this pandemic novel in 2010, predicting so much of what would happen ten years later. Her predictions are much grimmer than what came to pass, but it makes you think, America has got to be better prepared next time. Her predictions about climate change are also insightful, but I think we were thinking about climate change much more in the 2010s than we were thinking about a possible pandemic. The story of Cole--the harrowing survival tale of a young boy--is compelling, and effectively and sympathetically examines the cultural split (educated urbanites vs. evangelical Kentuckians) that would become all too clear in 2016. Nunez predicts a female president for her near-future world. Even she couldn't have anticipated Trump. ( )

Cole is just a young boy in a small city in Indiana (though he and his parents had, until recently, lived in Chicago) when the flu pandemic hits. It hits so hard that big cities like Chicago become nightmare zones. And even little cities like the one he and his parents are living in cannot help but succumb. Cole has all the usual challenges of any 10 or 11 year old boy — difficulty with bullies at school, embarrassing bodily maturation, parents whom he thinks just don’t understand him. But then this. People are dying everywhere. Even in his own home. Although Cole survives, he goes from one strange and nightmarish environment to another. First to an orphanage and then to Salvation City with a couple who would like to adopt him. It’s a very strange world.

Sigrid Nunez so accurately describes the fallout of a worldwide flu pandemic that you’d be forgiven for thinking this was written in the past couple of years. It wasn’t. It was published 10 years before COVID. But obviously everything that happened recently was entirely predictable. This makes the first section of the book eerie in the extreme. But then the shift to a Christian religious community in the remainder of the book is equally eerie, or at least it was for me. It’s not always clear what Nunez is aiming at here. Which may explain why the book just drifts off in the end. As though she ran out of steam and just needed to end it. Of course maybe I’m missing something.

Parts of the book are very well written and a few of the characters do stand out. But overall it seems like a missed opportunity. So I don’t think I would really recommend it. ( )

Maturing During a Pandemic

In Salvation City, National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez imagines a global flu epidemic, the toll it takes on a 13 year-old boy left alone after the death of his parents, and his adjustment to and lessons taken from an evangelical pastor and community he comes to live with. Published in 2010, Nunez most probably wrote the novel during the 2009 H1/N1 flu pandemic that ultimately killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide. While this event stays mostly in the background of her coming of age novel, early on she vividly describes enough so we see, looking back, that it portends the problems we currently face addressing the coronavirus pandemic, which as of this writing is approaching 1,000,000 dead worldwide, 200,000 of which are in the U.S.A. (likely, these figures are on an order higher, as will probably be shown a few years from now). Often we hear people, especially those in the present U.S. government, claim that nobody could have known such a pandemic could occur as justification for the massive death toll. But past events and numerous novelists, including Nunez, put a lie to this claim. About the only consolation we can take is that it is not nearly as devastating as the one in the novel.

Cole is a quiet kid, without many friends, with a love and skill at drawing, and with parents who most will consider a bit iconoclastic, particularly with the American penchant for religion. Which adds irony to the novel, when, after they succumb to the flu, and Cole wins his battle against it and also survives life in a mismanaged orphanage for displaced children, of which there are many, he finds himself in the home of a fundamentalist pastor who prefers to be called PW and his younger child-like and subservient wife Tracy. Nunez gives evenhanded treatment to PW and others in the religious community of Salvation City, using their beliefs about morality and condemnation to enhance the maturation trials of young Cole. As you might expect, Cole has lots of problems with his parents, added to a sense of abandonment, which he has to resolve. Awkward at first in PW and Tracy’s home and the community, he comes to adopt them as his surrogate family. He does suffer some disillusioning episodes, such as that with the “it” girl of the community, Starlyn, but also some inspiring encounters with strength of character and second chances, which he learns from PW, who in many ways functions as a better father than his own had been. As you would expect, he progresses from a confused, tormented, and rudderless boy to one who finally begins to come to terms with his parents, events, and the direction he wants to head in.

Nunez writes with clarity and compassion for Cole and his new family so that you will care both for the boy and a community often dismissed or caricatured in contemporary literature. With regard to coming of age novels and family sagas, especially those set against particularly trying backdrops, you’ll find this among the best. And the pandemic adds relevancy for today’s readers, another plus.
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Maturing During a Pandemic

In Salvation City, National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez imagines a global flu epidemic, the toll it takes on a 13 year-old boy left alone after the death of his parents, and his adjustment to and lessons taken from an evangelical pastor and community he comes to live with. Published in 2010, Nunez most probably wrote the novel during the 2009 H1/N1 flu pandemic that ultimately killed nearly 300,000 people worldwide. While this event stays mostly in the background of her coming of age novel, early on she vividly describes enough so we see, looking back, that it portends the problems we currently face addressing the coronavirus pandemic, which as of this writing is approaching 1,000,000 dead worldwide, 200,000 of which are in the U.S.A. (likely, these figures are on an order higher, as will probably be shown a few years from now). Often we hear people, especially those in the present U.S. government, claim that nobody could have known such a pandemic could occur as justification for the massive death toll. But past events and numerous novelists, including Nunez, put a lie to this claim. About the only consolation we can take is that it is not nearly as devastating as the one in the novel.

Cole is a quiet kid, without many friends, with a love and skill at drawing, and with parents who most will consider a bit iconoclastic, particularly with the American penchant for religion. Which adds irony to the novel, when, after they succumb to the flu, and Cole wins his battle against it and also survives life in a mismanaged orphanage for displaced children, of which there are many, he finds himself in the home of a fundamentalist pastor who prefers to be called PW and his younger child-like and subservient wife Tracy. Nunez gives evenhanded treatment to PW and others in the religious community of Salvation City, using their beliefs about morality and condemnation to enhance the maturation trials of young Cole. As you might expect, Cole has lots of problems with his parents, added to a sense of abandonment, which he has to resolve. Awkward at first in PW and Tracy’s home and the community, he comes to adopt them as his surrogate family. He does suffer some disillusioning episodes, such as that with the “it” girl of the community, Starlyn, but also some inspiring encounters with strength of character and second chances, which he learns from PW, who in many ways functions as a better father than his own had been. As you would expect, he progresses from a confused, tormented, and rudderless boy to one who finally begins to come to terms with his parents, events, and the direction he wants to head in.

Nunez writes with clarity and compassion for Cole and his new family so that you will care both for the boy and a community often dismissed or caricatured in contemporary literature. With regard to coming of age novels and family sagas, especially those set against particularly trying backdrops, you’ll find this among the best. And the pandemic adds relevancy for today’s readers, another plus.
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I am a fan so it pains me to say that this was a 'meh'. Lots of potential but blah overall. Color me sad. ( )