Three years after the pandemic began, it seems like we're finally seeing an influx of novels that incorporate the weird drama of the lockdown period in creative and interesting ways. That's not to say that there haven’t already been all sorts of books that have engaged with the pandemic. It's just that this latest crop appears to be entering into a new sort of dialogue with what we've all been through --- twisting it into horror, transforming it into psychological suspense or commenting on it obliquely --- which is what Tara Conklin does in her new novel.

"[The book's] acknowledgment of the necessity and messy complexity of community and interpersonal relationships (even if it might be safer to stay indoors) feels like a universal truth that we all just might understand a little more keenly now than we did in, say, 2019."

COMMUNITY BOARD may be set in early 2019, but Conklin wrote it starting in 2020, and the pandemic vibes are strong. Darcy Clipper, the book’s narrator, is having her own moment of abrupt recalibration: "with the turn of a doorknob, the beat of a heart, everything changes. Everything stops." In Darcy's case, what's stopping is her marriage. Her husband, Skip, has suddenly left her for a woman named Bianca, a skydiving instructor he met during a team-building outing at work. Darcy is blindsided and distraught --- so much so that her boss at a small insurance company outside Boston urges her to take a sabbatical from her actuarial job, assuring her that her position will be saved for her when she returns.

So Darcy heads to a place where she knows what to expect and that seemingly never changes: the small western Massachusetts town of Murbridge, where she grew up. But when she arrives at her parents' house, it seems abandoned. A quick phone call reveals that they have decamped to a retirement community in Arizona to try out the dry heat for a year and see if they might want to relocate permanently. Stunned, saddened and unmoored --- especially after her boss backs out of his promise --- Darcy hunkers down, alone, in her parents' place, slowly eating her way through the canned food her mom had stocked up on in preparation for Y2K.

Darcy’s only glimpse of the outside world is the online community board (think Nextdoor) where the town's minor crises and petty grievances play out in real time. When her supplies of Chef Boyardee finally start to run low, she turns to the same message board as a source of income. She finds extremely creative (and surprisingly effective) ways to track down and rescue lost pets of various types, collecting the reward money (when she's not too creeped out by human contact to accept it).

Slowly and somewhat reluctantly, Darcy begins to reinsert herself into the life of the town, drawn into the real-life antecedents of those mysteries and squabbles from the online community board. When one family's construction project threatens to tear the town apart, Darcy has to decide whether to retreat further or to fight for what she knows Murbridge can and should become.

With her blend of loneliness, self-isolation and fear of human interaction (not to mention all those pantry staples), Darcy's year in Murbridge offers clear parallels to the pandemic mindset. Near the end of the book, Conklin even includes some winking nods to what's coming around the bend for Darcy and her community once 2020 dawns.

Although COMMUNITY BOARD is a pandemic novel at its heart, it doesn’t read overtly like one. Its acknowledgment of the necessity and messy complexity of community and interpersonal relationships (even if it might be safer to stay indoors) feels like a universal truth that we all just might understand a little more keenly now than we did in, say, 2019.