So, a good friend reading the NYT while I was wasting my time writing you guys, tested me that the NYT wrote about The Plague.

[Mark Kohut]

Soft-hearted Alain de Botton, who some consider a bit soft-headed--I mean a
great book promoter but a real 'thinker"?...I wouldn't know....although I
did read some of him on Proust.....I think that pivot in the second
sentence might be good-hearted projection...in this novel. Will let you
know.

Pull Quote:

"This is what Camus meant when he talked about the “absurdity” of life.
Recognizing this absurdity should lead us not to despair but to a
tragicomic redemption, a softening of the heart, a turning away from
judgment and moralizing to joy and gratitude."

Well, I haven't quite finished the reread but I think the good Doctor Rieux
quoted herein contains the overarching theme. In fact, there is a character
trying to escape locked down Oran to be with his girl because life and love
is for the young---"we start to decline" in looks and everything in
our thirties,
he says, reminding perhaps of those millennials on spring break. And don't
forget what lit critic Kohut said, there is hardly a word about the
possibility of contagion in this  novel. And take this too, Alain---I think
hardly anyone thinks this is the *greatest *postwar novel, given the
competition.

But, yes, the complacency and denial of the populace is real in this novel.

O yeah, and my life partner, bringing in the Wash Post newspaper because I
was too busy being self-important online, told me like a good character in *The
Plague* that Georgie Will has written on it too.

Must now encounter Georgie Porgie, who is surely going to commend
the necessity of the lockdown for society's well-being.



https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/19/opinion/coronavirus-camus-plague.html?searchResultPosition=1