Panpocalypse

December 20, 2021
Moore (The Not Wives) offers an evocative if undercooked story of New York City at the onset of the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Orpheus, a 47-year-old poet who’s lived in the city since her early 20s, buys a bike before they sell out across the city, maxing out her credit card to do so. Her idea is to go somewhere, anywhere besides staying indoors. She bides the time of the pandemic cultivating social pods with her friends Gina, Lana, and Beemer, all the while hoping vestiges of the city as she knew it will survive. Orpheus’s loneliness is made palpable and expertly portrayed in short chapters that feel like diary entries; she resolves to “put the world in the book,” and Moore doesn’t miss a step, chronicling Orpheus’s involvement in Black Lives Matter protests and the All Cops Are Bastards movement. The short chapters can waver, especially when Moore drifts between recent events and unflagged flashbacks to Orpheus’s childhood. Some of the accounts of 2020 feel unprocessed and lacking in perspective, but Moore shines when channeling readers’ collective fears for the future. It’s a little slight, but it works as a pandemic time capsule.

January 1, 2022
At the intersection of disability, queerness, and the pandemic, one woman's meditation on loneliness and connection. Originally serialized in the early months of the pandemic, this work of autofiction is narrated by Orpheus (sometimes called Carley and, briefly, Charlie), a queer disabled professor in her 40s. Orpheus is grappling with twin emotions: a loneliness forced on her by ex-lovers who don't want to see her and a loneliness forced on her by a pandemic that won't let her see the ones who do. As she rides through the mostly deserted city on her newly acquired bicycle, she hopes to see friends and her ex-girlfriend Eurydice. What she witnesses is sickness, police brutality, and brief moments of connection between and with strangers. Desperate to touch and be touched, when she gets an invitation through the dating app Lex to an underground club styled after the 1930s Parisian lesbian club Le Monocle, she jumps at the chance to go. Moore has a fascination with time; her nonlinear narrative is peppered with Orpheus' childhood memories of abusive doctors and portals into other worlds and time periods. While Moore does not shy away from the heaviness of her subject matter, the gravity is nonetheless offset by her persistent gentle humor and her optimistic bent: "If nothing else, we have all had to slow down. Some of us had to stop altogether. Sick time is anti-capitalist, revolutionary if you can accept it or even see it. Care and community in the time of the police state are radical acts. Still, to this day." And while the pandemic permeates every moment of the novel, Orpheus' desperate search for autonomy, relationships, and self-actualization feels perennial. At once timely and timeless.

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February 1, 2022
Originally published online in weekly installments during the pandemic summer of 2020, Moore's work of "autofiction" is inspired by Greek myth but set in the present. Orpheus buys a bicycle just as stores are sellinig out. Naturally, she is searching for Eurydice, who is not only the first woman this Orpheus has fallen in love with but also, alas, the first woman who has broken her sensitive heart. Even with her precious bicycle, finding the elusive Eurydice in a rampaging pandemic in New York City is no easy feat. But then, through the grapevine, Orpheus hears about an underground bar with the magical name of Le Monocle, the same name as the famous lesbian club in 1930s Paris. Perfect. Will she be able to locate it? And even if she does, will Eurydice be there? And even if she is, will they be able to mend their fractured relationship? These are just some of the questions confronting our queer and disabled protagonist. Moore's Panpocalypse is a wonderfully inventive novel about love, illness, and the devastating loneliness of isolation.

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