Malavika Kannan’s Unprecedented Times arrives at a peculiar cultural moment: five years on from the first lockdowns, the pandemic has generated more memes than literature, more celebrity Instagram apologies than genuine reckoning. The appetite for Covid storytelling has felt, as Kannan herself observes, almost nonexistent, perhaps because the memories still sting in ways that resist the neat arc of narrative. Into that gap steps a 25-year-old writer who was, crucially, inside the experience she is describing.
Malavika Kannan’s Unprecedented Times and the campus novel reimagined
The novel follows Rishi, the queer daughter of Tamil immigrants, as she begins her first year at Stanford, according to Vogue. Rishi arrives with the full freight of expectation that attaches to a first-generation American leaving a strict Florida childhood behind: she wants to reinvent herself, find her community, have gay sex. The campus novel has always been a container for exactly this kind of longing, its closed world functioning as a pressure cooker in which character is formed or broken. What Kannan adds is a pressure cooker with a faulty seal: the pandemic arrives and detonates the whole apparatus. When COVID interrupts their first year, Rishi and her college friends relocate to a farm collective in Pennsylvania, exchanging Stanford’s promised freedoms for something more provisional and strange.
Published by Henry Holt and Company, the novel is one of the first pieces of pandemic fiction written by and explicitly for gen Z, and the distinction matters. The first wave of Covid novels, as Kannan wryly puts it, was ‘very naval-gazy autofiction’, a mode she simultaneously critiques and inhabits, though in a different register: less confessional monologue, more immersive character study in the tradition of campus fiction that has always understood the new environment as the engine of plot. You learn the rules of a place alongside the protagonist; at Stanford, those rules are withdrawn almost immediately, replaced by an improvised communal life in rural Pennsylvania.
‘Rishi has a really distinctive voice and is definitely someone that I relate to deeply,’ Kannan says. ‘My goal was to write a protagonist [where] you feel immersed in her point of view, but you can also disagree with her.’ This is, in practice, harder to execute than it sounds. Rishi is a fully fleshed-out character whose frontal lobe is still developing. She is flawed in ways that make for compelling reading without being so insufferable that you stop rooting for her. Kannan says she grew tired of what she calls the genre of immigrant novel in which ‘anyone but the first-generation American protagonist is a villain’. Every supporting character, from Rishi’s friends to her family, is rendered as whole and contradictory as the protagonist herself.
Self-awareness, the internet age, and the political landscape of 2020
Much of the novel’s energy comes from Rishi’s acute, somewhat painful self-awareness. She can identify the dynamic by which people are too hard on their mothers while simultaneously being nasty to her own. ‘In making her voice so self-aware, I was trying to say something about what selfhood is like in the age of the internet,’ Kannan says. ‘A lot of us have so much information available at our disposal. We can identify dynamics and patterns, but that doesn’t necessarily empower us to do anything.’ The gap between insight and action is one of the defining conditions of being young and online, and Unprecedented Times takes it seriously as a structural feature of its protagonist’s consciousness rather than a personal failing.
But Unprecedented Times is not simply a Covid novel. It functions as a 2020 period piece, threading in the political and cultural landscape of the moment: the aftermath of #MeToo, the particular texture of coming of age on social media, the specific weight of climate activism for a generation that grew up with it as a moral obligation. Kannan herself left Florida for Stanford in 2019, having advocated for gun violence prevention in the wake of the Pulse nightclub and Parkland shootings, and the biographical proximity to Rishi’s story is palpable throughout the novel’s first-person narration.
‘The pandemic was a huge radicalising experience for most Americans,’ Kannan says. ‘But it hit different for a generation of people who had not gotten a chance to see the American dream work as promised.’ She finished the novel while still in college and says she would have ‘unironically stood by Rishi’ had it come out then. Now, she says, she feels like Rishi’s older sister.
Kannan guesses a second wave of Covid depictions is coming. Unprecedented Times, published by Henry Holt and Company, is already staking out the territory.
