In Malavika Kannan’s debut adult novel, Unprecedented Times, an adult life that has only just begun in earnest is rerouted by a pandemic that many of us remember all too well.
Kannan’s story centers on Rishi, the queer daughter of Tamil immigrants, who relocates with her college friends to a farm collective in Pennsylvania when COVID interrupts their first year at Stanford. And, much like Elif Batuman’s Selin Karadağ, Raven Leilani’s Edie, and Sarah Thankam Mathews’s Sneha before her, Rishi is alternately lovable and utterly maddening as she struggles to define herself beyond her background and present circumstances.
Vogue spoke to Kannan about drawing inspiration from Zora Neale Hurston and Jade Sharma, delivering Rishi into an “anti-coming-of-age” narrative, crafting the book’s layered ending, and more.
Vogue: How did the idea for Unprecedented Times take shape for you?
Malavika Kannan: I had been a fan of the campus-novel genre for so long, but I couldn’t imagine a world in which the cloistered university setting wasn’t impacted by the onset of these cataclysmic global events. I’d been in college during the pandemic and during quarantine, which is also when I fell in love with literature again, and I heard this podcast—I think it was Dear Sugars with Cheryl Strayed and George Saunders—where he gave young writers who might be listening the advice to write everything down just in case, because you might not know what the metaphor is that makes everything make sense later on.
Your book is one of the few I’ve read that actually captures the strange, liminal mood of the early pandemic. What were some of the challenges of writing about that time?
A lot of what I was trying to do with this book was play with the experience of time when you’re a young person—which is, I think, reflected in the title, as well as the idea that when you’re a young person, your sense of space is so warped and everything feels like it’s happening for the first time. All of these timescales are at play, whether they’re generational or international, and then there’s the timeline of the pandemic itself, where every day feels like living the same day all over again. I think for me, writing Unprecedented Times was about managing these different states of time on the page in a way that would keep the reader entertained.
How did you make the decision to introduce so much trauma into Rishi’s story toward the end of the novel, rather than earlier on?
I think that the ending of the book is going to be a controversial choice. I chose to end the book on the note that I did for a couple of reasons. I was really interested in the narrative having the shape of an anti-coming of age, where the main character thinks she knows a lot at the beginning, and it turns out that she doesn’t know very much. I wanted the trajectory of the story to be one of disillusionment, because for many of us, that’s what the pandemic was. There was no sweeping social reform afterwards and I think many would argue that the country is now a profoundly worse place. I feel like a lot of our dreams were fractured, and I wanted that to feel true for protagonists on the page as well. I also wanted to close the loop on some of the questions that the main character had with regards to patriarchy and to what extent she, as the first woman in her family who has what feels like unprecedented agency to live her life on her terms—whether that pans out.
