As the United States marks five years since the onset of COVID-19, while also watching our system of government enter uncharted territory, the politicized pandemic looms ever larger as a dividing line in our culture. America was already sharply divided when the coronavirus arrived, but something has changed when the president who initiated “Operation Warp Speed” appoints the country’s most infamous vaccine skeptic as his Secretary of Health and Human Services.
Neal Shusterman’s All Better Now leverages the unsettling sense that as our country took sides over pandemic precautions, it almost seemed like some people were downright eager to let COVID romp. In this near-future tale, a dwindling number of the uninfected are left wondering whether a peculiarly persuasive virus will succeed in transforming humanity.
Shusterman, already established as a blockbuster talent in YA speculative fiction, imagines the coming of a second virus that’s superficially similar to COVID: claiming millions of lives even as most of the infected survive. In the case of “Crown Royale,” however, those who recover find themselves basking in a permanent sense of well-being. In fact, they begin to believe that it’s morally wrong to deny others the benefits of infection.
To make this premise work, the author has to convincingly portray a state of mind in which one is still essentially oneself, but simply goes about the day in an enviable good mood — as well as tracing the downsides of such a situation. Shusterman pulls this off without falling into philosophical considerations that might push the story beyond YA territory.
Without closing the book, so to speak, on whether being “embraced” (as those who have recovered identify themselves) might be on balance a good thing, Shusterman portrays post-infected people as being so good-hearted, it’s dangerous. For example, when confronted with a drowning person or a burning building, the “embraced” heedlessly throw themselves into the fray even when doing so helps no one and only increases the number of people who need rescuing.
The book’s lucid interweaving plot lines involve the rogue son of a billionaire; an ambitious young woman who suddenly comes into wealth; and powerful people battling each other over whether Crown Royale should be encouraged or contained. The entire story is built on the mental infrastructure all of us who lived through COVID lockdowns share: the masking, the social distancing, the sheer exhaustion of weighing life-and-death risk factors every time the milk runs out.
For all the story’s globe-spanning developments and explosive (literally) confrontations, the passages that will stick with you are the deeply creepy interactions between a permanently contagious “alpha spreader” and the people he infects — to varying levels of their own enthusiasm. None of us can ever un-know just how intimate it is simply to share space with another person, even if bodies never touch.
The author is one of two voices narrating the All Better Now audiobook, along with Greg Tremblay. Both narrators are amply skilled; the hops between voices help establish leaps from the book’s main story and situations unfolding elsewhere. It’s a great listen, albeit one that creates a peculiar sense of mirror reality for those of us who once used audiobooks to escape pandemic reality.
All Better Now ends with multiple characters’ journeys still in motion, a situation ripe for a sequel. So, unfortunately, is the very real pandemic that inspired it.
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