It’s become a truism that we have failed to grapple with the personal and societal trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. On my cynical days, I have boiled this down to saying that certain people were radicalized by having to be considerate of others for a few months in 2020. Mostly, I try to take a more generous view. Every one of us experienced a sharp, often painful rupture in how we interfaced with the world: short-term and long-term losses of jobs, of social spaces, of health. We lost continuity, all of us, all at once, suddenly.
The Strange Case of Jane O. does reveal itself, ultimately, as a pandemic novel; but it is from the first chapter a story about the loss of continuity, and the ruptures such a loss creates. In 2018, a woman named Jane comes to the office of psychologist Henry Byrd, stays for fourteen uncomfortable, silent minutes, and then abruptly leaves. Three days later, Dr. Byrd gets a call that Jane has been found unconscious in Prospect Park, with no memory of the past twenty-four hours. Tests reveal nothing that would explain her diagnosis, although Dr. Byrd wonders if she may, as the single mother to a young son, be having some postpartum issues.
As Dr. Byrd gets to know Jane better, he learns that she came to him initially for help with some strange, inexplicable experiences. On a street, for instance, she has encountered an adult version of a boy she knew as a teenager—a boy whom she knows to be dead. Their conversation was quite normal, until the end, when he told her, “If you can, I’d get out of the city.” Jane hopes that Dr. Byrd can help her make sense of the experience.
To readers in search of work that straddles the boundary between litfic and specfic, Karen Thompson Walker has been a consistent joy. Her books are dreamy, personal, thoughtful. She doesn’t—as many literary writers dipping a toe into science fictional waters do—flinch from the concrete realities of the speculative stories she chooses to tell. Yet she also allows reality to bleed into unreality, blurring the lines between them until neither characters nor reader are certain of what’s true.
For instance, we learn early on that Jane has a perfect memory. She’s able to recall the exact events of any given day in her life, down to the headlines in the newspaper, so long as she took note of those details at the time. Is this real? Is it possible? Certainly she passes the small tests that Dr. Byrd sets for her, although he later discovers, by way of the police officer in charge of her case, that several of the things Jane has told him in session are untrue. (The book says that her claims do not “have a corollary in reality,” which I am going to start saying in professional settings when I think someone’s full of it.) The neighbor whose dead body she claims to have found is actually alive and well. Her claims about the timeline of another death in her past directly contradict the medical evidence surrounding the death.
But Dr. Byrd doesn’t believe that Jane is lying. He can’t reconcile the facts with what Jane has told him—but he doesn’t believe that she’s lying. As their work together continues, she suffers another, more serious break from reality. More serious because it lasts longer (ten days, this time), but also because this time, when she disappears, she takes her baby with her. As the police, Jane’s family, and the press kick into overdrive trying to find the missing mother and child, they’re able to catch glimpses of Jane: a drugstore camera captures footage of her buying items that suggest a planned crime; Jane sends a mysterious text message to her parents saying it’s not safe to travel; a building’s security camera spots her sneaking around the lobby with a scarf covering her mouth and nose.
At this point in the book, a penny dropped, and I threw a tantrum.
(Please note: The wrong penny dropped. I was simply wrong.)
I became convinced that the twist was going to be that Jane was slipping out of time and experiencing COVID a few years before its actual arrival. To this twist, I had roughly the reaction that a teenager would have if their parent came to pick them up at a sleepover and attempted to do a slang in front of all their friends: I felt mortified to the extent of experiencing physical symptoms. I stopped reading and texted my friend angrily to explain the book’s plot and its twist. She agreed with me that it was fatally cringe. We fulminated about it for, like, a while, and then I went back and finished the book and the twist was actually something different.
Rather than time-traveling forward into COVID times, Jane O. appears to be slipping sideways into a parallel universe, very much like ours but not quite; a world that is struck, in 2018, by a different, deadlier pandemic, one with a 40% fatality rate, particularly dangerous for children. In this world, a myriad things are slightly different to the “real” world where Dr. Byrd resides—which accounts for the discrepancies between the stories she tells Dr. Byrd and the realities he learns from the cop on her case.
That twist felt fine for me. I did not feel mortal secondhand embarrassment about it.
In retrospect, the strength of that initial reaction fascinated me. I’m not prone to violent fits of cringe, except in really serious cases like that time Jared Padalecki used Twitter to fuss at Jensen Ackles for not including him in the Supernatural prequel project, or the time that a BBC interviewer politely told Naomi Wolf that the whole premise of her book was untrue. What, then, could account for the way I had felt when I believed I’d been led down an interesting speculative path only to have the twist be COVID all along?
Early in his therapeutic relationship with Jane O., Dr. Byrd makes the observation, “I noticed that Jane had a habit of diverting my attention away from the specific, the private, the self. It seemed that it was easier for Jane to speak in generalities.” What I learned from reading The Strange Case of Jane O. is that I feel much the same about pandemic stories. I can talk about the pandemic in aggregate. When it gets down to brass tacks, however—the specific COVID stories of an individual person, like Jane O. in this book or Pacey’s character in the very insane ABC show Doctor Odyssey—I become resentful and obstreperous.
COVID feels, inherently and utterly, boring. All the things that could be said about COVID were said, daily, on Twitter, throughout the course of 2020 and then 2021 and then 2022 and then … There’s no part of it that doesn’t weary me. I’m tired of the whining about masks; I’m tired of wearing a mask. I’m tired of vaccine denialism. I’m tired of vaccines as the one and only solution, when we could have put money into installing better ventilation systems in schools and daycares. I’m tired of my loved ones having long COVID. I’m tired of people not really believing in long COVID and I can see it on their faces when I talk about my loved ones who have long COVID. I am tired. I have lived and breathed (literally, literally) COVID for five years, and I can’t bear to keep doing it anymore, and being unable to bear doing it anymore does not remove the necessity of keeping doing it. This goddamn pandemic and its cures (that word is an anagram for curse): They are inside my body, inescapable, pulling me askew, the world askew. How dare they be in my fiction too?
But that, ultimately, is the very point the book is making.
Dr. Byrd comes to believe that Jane’s experiences are real. In those days when she’s absent from herself, living in a different and differently terrible reality, he believes that she is slipping sideways into, literally, another reality. Her experiences aren’t hallucinatory. They’re true. They just aren’t true in the version of the world that Dr. Byrd inhabits (this version of Dr. Byrd, anyway; our narrator). Trauma, he believes, pulls the world askew, warps reality in a way that we cannot objectively experience or understand. In 2018, he isn’t sure of exactly what collective trauma might have warped the fabric of reality sufficiently to allow Jane O.—an exceptional person, in some ways, and a very ordinary person in others—to access one of the alternate realities that exist alongside our own. We, the readers, know. In two years, Dr. Byrd will, too.
Like much of Karen Thompson Walker’s work, The Strange Case of Jane O. doesn’t come to hard and fast conclusions about the science of it all. Dr. Byrd shares some studies about the shifting of reality during collective trauma. He entertains the possibility that Jane’s ability to see across worlds might be related to her phenomenal eidetic memory. If a mind is capable of one unlikely feat—and we know that the human brain is capable of many—what makes us so sure that another unlikely feat is, in fact, impossible?
In therapy, we sit ourselves down and commit to finding (or making) meaning. It’s no accident that this book’s core is a therapeutic relationship, as Jane and Dr. Byrd turn Jane’s experiences over and over, reflecting on them from this angle and that, trying to pick out the meaning from all these seeming incongruities and insanities. If I am resistant to COVID books (which apparently I really, really am), perhaps it’s for this very reason. When I look back on those early days of the pandemic, and the years that have followed, I can’t find meaning in them. When the pandemic came, we were, morally and politically, not equal to it. We got sicker. We got meaner. The Strange Case of Jane O. doesn’t suggest that any of its traumas—Jane’s losses across different universes, the death of Dr. Byrd’s wife, the death of Jane’s classmate at a young age—were all for the best, or made anyone better or wiser. They just are; they will always have been. The love that made the loss painful is still real after the loss has occurred.
As it’s coming to a close, The Strange Case of Jane O. includes a scene where Jane and Dr. Byrd are sitting on a park bench talking about the profound experience they’ve shared. It’s a lovely scene, fragile and uncertain and deeply felt. They are parting for what Dr. Byrd insists must be the last time, given his feelings for her and the inappropriateness of having a relationship with a patient. At the last second, he turns back. Their hands touch. On a personal note, I would simply love it if writers would stop twisting themselves into pretzels to justify therapists getting into romantic relationships with their patients. I give my solemn promise to authors everywhere that it is possible for a man and a woman to share an important experience without needing to kiss about it.
For the most part, however, The Strange Case of Jane O. is deeply felt yet unsentimental, thought-provoking without insisting on its answers. It’s a pandemic novel that isn’t quite a pandemic novel, but still perfectly captures the bewilderment, mistrust, and uncertainty of our COVID era. When Jane is living in the other universe, she feels that she does not exist. Dr. Byrd notes that she carries the evidence of her continued existence in her body: the sunburns she sustained in Prospect Park are beginning to peel. Those of us—all of us—who lived through the pandemic carry it in our bodies too.