Reading “The Plague” During a Plague, and Memorial Day by the Pool

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 May 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When schools were closed owing to the coronavirus outbreak, the English teacher Petria May did the most natural thing she could think of: she assigned her tenth-grade class to read Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague,” which describes a quarantine during an outbreak of disease. Plus, a short story by Peter Cameron. In “Memorial Day,” a teen-age boy is forced to spend a beautiful Memorial Day with the two people he really can’t deal with: his mother and his new stepfather, Lonnie, who’s so young he’s sometimes mistaken for the narrator’s brother. The boy is talkative in school, and he writes letters to pen pals in prison, but at home he hasn’t spoken a word in months. Noah Galvin reads the story, which was originally published in The New Yorker in 1983.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.5	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.
0:14.9	Just looking at my screen, I feel like you can just see my whole life on my wall, which is kind of weird. Oh, for sure.
0:25.2	Oh, I never turned my camera on. Like sometimes I'm like, oh, please don't judge me. I didn't clean,
0:31.3	but like, I have to like come to class. After her students left the building in March, not to return for the rest of the school year, Petria May decided to make the best of it, and she changed the curriculum and gave her 10th grade class Albert Camus' 1947 novel, The Plague.
0:50.1	I actually really like it. The Plague, even though it's relevant to an almost scary degree, I find it much more enjoyable.
1:01.3	I agree. I don't, I wouldn't say that I would go and read this book for pleasure. Like that probably would not. No, I definitely would not. But I still think it's an important thing to read.
1:11.7	It helps to feel like someone else would kind of understand what we're going through.
1:18.3	Camus' book describes an outbreak of plague in a coastal city in Algeria,
1:22.8	which is then completely cordoned off and guarded.
1:25.9	There's a doctor trying to treat the suffering,
1:28.1	a criminal who profits on the black market, a priest, a journalist, all understanding and
1:33.2	responding to the disaster in various ways. Actually, I actually recommended my mom
1:39.7	kind of with like a challenge not to just line up the obvious similarities.
1:46.0	I feel like you can say like, okay, yeah, like it's a plague, it's quarantine,
1:49.7	and you know, the authorities are not being responsible.
1:53.0	Like there's all these like obvious similarities,
1:55.0	but I feel like there's also like so many deeper lessons about just like what it means
2:00.3	to live in a state of fear and like what
2:02.1	human reaction to change is. Yeah, a character I feel like I've kind of latched on to is Rambere.
2:10.1	I think his whole like him wanting to escape felt very relatable. Like definitely not like
2:15.0	I'm not trying to go see my wife in france but i do there is this
	...

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