By Michael Lewis

ALL POSTS CONTAIN SPOILERS

Sometimes, I encounter books that I should want to read, because they are good or about something interesting or whatever, but I avoid reading them because they stress me out. I know that they are worth reading – I just don’t want to read them because the idea of reading them makes me feel bad.

Most of these books fall into the category of ‘Books About Things Happening Right Now In The World That Are Important And True But That You Cannot Personally Change Or Do Anything About And So You Just Have To Live With Them Even Though They Are Terrible‘. I really don’t like books in this category, and I know that that is cowardly and self-indulgent and babyish, I know that, but I still avoid those books like the plague.

And, yes, I know that staying abreast of what’s happening in the world is part of being a responsible and learned adult, I know that we all live in a global society and that we have an obligation to face unpleasant facts about the world, to look around us with our eyes open and see what is, I know that!

But sometimes I don’t want to, OK? Sometimes I don’t want to keep endlessly informing myself about all the horrible, insoluble shit that is going on around me all the time. Sometimes, I want to chill the fuck out and watch ‘The Witcher’ and not confront the endless parade of threats to the world order!

But my mom gave me ‘The Premonition’ and because I really like Michael Lewis and my mom, I read it.

‘The Premonition’ is basically the story of a couple of people operating at the fringes of the United States government who have, for the past two decades or so, been trying to prepare us all for a pandemic they believed was inevitable. There are really only two heroes in this book: Charity Dean, an apparently unerring California public health MD, and a VA doctor named Carter Mecher, who is perfect like Dean but lacks her charisma. The villain is the CDC. If ‘The Premonition’ is to be believed, the CDC is essentially a collected group of craven ineffectuals, people so selfish that they would rather let Americans die than take a brave stand on anything at all. People so political that they end being, functionally if not morally, pro-disease.

And, look, it’s a pretty good story. I don’t know that it’s his best book, but it’s totally standard Michael Lewis fare: smart individuals revolutionizing (or trying to revolutionize) archaic and unwieldy systems. Well-executed reporting, clear explaining, zippy prose, interesting characters.

Great.

And I know that what I’m about to say is not, like, an intelligent response, but here’s the thing: I do not want to read about the pandemic. I am living through the pandemic – I don’t want to read books about it right now. I especially don’t want to read books about how it all might have been handled differently, if only we had all been smarter or better prepared or had listened to better, braver, smarter people. I do not want to read about what might have been, if only, if only. Not right now.

To be fair to the pandemic, there are other things wrong with ‘The Premonition’. The stress I am experiencing is in a large part due to Michael Lewis’s approach to the world in general. I like Lewis, I really do, but he does have a sort of Manichean worldview. He loves eccentrics and mavericks – he hates bureaucracies and conservatism.

And, forgive me, but that’s not a super brave or original point of view. Most people have more innate sympathy for mavericks than they do for massive government bureaucracies, it’s obvious. David and Goliath stories are innately appealing, but they are also stories, and the real world is almost always more complicated.

And, sure, nuance doesn’t make for good airplane reading, I get that, but we are living through this pandemic in real time, and I think it’s a little bit dickish to write an entire book which basically asserts that hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved if only we had all listened to two semi-obscure public servants.

I would never, ever, claim that the United States handled the pandemic perfectly, or even well. I would also never claim that the CDC is a flawless organization. There is no such thing as a flawless organization, and no one with any experience or maturity expects there to be.

But counterfactuals are a favorite tool of the weak-minded. The truth is, we do not know what might have happened if we had (as Lewis seems to wish) turned the entire workings of the United States government over to one plucky blonde public health officer from California. We cannot ever know what would have happened, and so implying that we would have been saved is irresponsible and arrogant.

Also, not to belabor this point too much, but the pandemic is not over – none of us know fully what happened yet, so we do not how we might have be helped in the end. Monday morning quarterbacking is annoying at the best of times – doing it before the game is even over is extra obnoxious.

Honestly, this book irritated me. Not because it was bad (it wasn’t), or because it was boring (it wasn’t), or because it was wrong (I have no idea whether or not it was). It irritated me because, while I think it’s fine for authors to simplify things to make them more intelligible or cinematic, I don’t think it’s OK to do it in real time, to events that are happening to real people. The pandemic has caused global distress, sickness and death. It has killed millions; it has disfigured the lives of people all over the world.

Most people, not all but most, tried to do their best during Covid. But a global pandemic is a massively complex phenomenon, and reducing that complexity in order to create heroes for your book is unhelpful. I get that Lewis has a real thing for Charity Dean, that is clear (I would bet my life savings she’s pretty), but that is not a reason to vilify everyone who isn’t her.

Isn’t the world hard enough as it is, right now, without embellishing? We might need heroes, but we don’t need false idols. And we have villains enough – creating more, even to give your heroes more lustre, is damaging.

Lewis is a storyteller, and this is what storytellers do: they pull narratives out of complexity. Fine. And ‘The Premonition’ is a good narrative. But I think it distorts reality in order to sound better, and I think that’s pretty unforgivable at the moment.