The Fiction That Turned Into Fact
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“She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. She will sometimes feel afraid. And so much of this life will remain always beyond her understanding, as obscure as the landscapes of someone else’s dreams.”
Throughout my life, reading pieces of fiction, from the Lemony Snicket and J.K. Rowling of my youth, to the Khaled Hosseini and Margaret Atwood of my adolescence, has always been a thrilling form of adventure. Fiction has also been a form of solace in times of personal struggle and deep anxiety towards our shifting geopolitical climate. Amidst the many changes that happened so quickly around us within the past few months, fiction became an all-too-familiar way to escape my growing weariness towards a way of life having ended. I tried to initially stick to feel-good novels that resembled nothing of our current headlines, but the most pivotal book that I had read previously and decided to revisit, was a story of a mysterious illness ravaging a community: The Dreamers by Karen Thompson Walker.
The Dreamers begins in the town of Santa Lora, California, as a freshman girl falls asleep in her dorm room and never wakes up. Soon enough, a terrifying and highly contagious virus sweeps through the town, with the epidemic resulting in thousands of sleepers and a military-backed quarantine. The book offers an intimate look at how many of us might respond to a crisis of this nature, as it’s told through the perspectives of a young pair of sisters, a group of college students, a lonely senior, and a young couple caring for their newborn. The stunning parallels between Santa Lora and our world, were what drew me deeper into the book as I witnessed flashes of entirely familiar feelings.
The familiarity came in the initial disbelief and dismissal “What a terrible thing going on at the college — this is the way the people of Santa Lora talk about it in the aisles of the hardware store, or as they walk their dogs, as if the college were an island apart from the town, its gates impenetrable, even by germs.”
It came in the sudden interruption of routine, “Campus is closed until further notice. The nursing home is closed to visitors. Something is happening at the grocery store, never before have they seen so many cars circling for spots. Questions are being raised: Are the health workers wearing the right protective gear?”
It also came in the misinformation, that continues to spread like wildfire, “It’s the government, they say. They probably engineered it themselves. They might be withholding the cure. And who do you think pays the salaries of these so-called journalists reporting all this fake news? Or maybe there’s no sickness at all. Protest signs begin to appear.”
The virus itself isn’t entirely the focus of the novel though, and what ultimately left me in awe were the raw discussions among the characters as they faced one disaster after another. While their stories were heart-wrenching to read about, the parallels between this fictional California town and our world, also provided me with something I didn’t expect to get from this book: hope.
It’s this hope, both local and global, that keeps communities united despite the isolating separation of distance. The hope I gained from The Dreamers was also a forgiveness of my guilt at having taken the pre-interruption days for granted, as well as a recognition of my own health and stability, privileges that so many others aren’t fortunate to have. It’s a hope that within the next page of a book, and in the day beyond the next, that these challenging times may pass further away from the present and eventually into the past. The tender humanity of The Dreamers didn’t only strengthen my hope amidst the many interruptions around us, but it also reinforced the idea of how the best way to keep personal fear at bay, may just be confronting fear itself.
What might the future look like? Karen Thompson Walker writes, “…and then, like the passing of a storm, the virus disappears. The barricades come down. Survivors pour out.”
This Executive Summary was contributed by Mateo Peralta.
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