“We drove down a narrow road,” she marvels. The novel could easily slip into the trap of first-world problems, as Shteyngart’s book does but Lucy quickens with insight once she and William arrive at their destination, its postcard vistas and slack pace. Still reeling from a third divorce and the recent discovery of a previously unknown sister, William senses the escalating global health crisis while Lucy, a renowned novelist, can’t quite fathom why she’s leaving behind friends and professional commitments.

William’s motivation is simple: He wants to get Lucy out of harm’s way. She’s mourning her second husband, David, a Philharmonic cellist who’d died a year earlier, when her first husband and close friend, William Gerhardt, a scientist, evacuates her to a rented house on the wind-cradled, sea-bitten New England coast. In Strout’s delicate, elliptical new novel, “Lucy by the Sea,” Barton struggles with disbelief as SARS-CoV-2 vectors into the city, infecting - and in some cases killing - acquaintances. Lucy Barton - the narrator in several of Elizabeth Strout’s novels, a kind of counterpart to John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom - is conflicted about her abrupt move from Manhattan to Maine, a reflex of entitlement. (A New York Times article featured a photograph of a quarantined Shteyngart, cocktail in hand, at his second house in Dutchess County, where he’d decamped.) So did Gary Shteyngart, whose novel, “ Our Country Friends,” chronicles members of the chattering classes displaced to a bungalow colony, away from the ceaseless sirens and spiking fatalities. As recounted in their respective books, “ Last Best Hope” and “ Intimations,” George Packer and Zadie Smith had the means to flee New York when the city locked down in March 2020. Now the literature of Covid has landed, pretty much on schedule, informed by the sensibilities of the well-off. In the 21st century, we’ve already seen waves of reportage and fiction in the aftermaths of 9/11, tsunamis, Brexit and Trumpism.

When global events erupt like earthquakes, writers rush to record the aftershocks.

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