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I've been left sorely disappointed by the early crop of Covid novels, including Sarah Hall's Burntcoat, and it would be sacrilege to even mention the existence of Gary Shteyngart's painfully unfunny satire Our Country Friends in the same paragraph as earnest, good-faith literary efforts like this one.

[clears throat for paragraph break]

So I'm just going to review The Fell as the third of Sarah Moss's shortish novels I've read in the past two years. This seemed much slighter, compared to either Ghost Wall or Summerwater. She's working with a narrower canvas here: entering into four streams of consciousness over a 24-hour period in a Peak District village during the winter lockdown of 2020-21. But there's a drudge-y sameness to these subjectivities: Kate, a 40ish quarantine breaker, single parent, and furloughed cafe waitress with possible Covid exposure; Alice, her wealthy retired neighbor; Matt, her gaming-addicted teenage son (whose voice just fell flat on the page); and Rob, a volunteer from the local mountain rescue team with his own messed-up family life.

Perhaps Moss was just dramatizing the horrible endless kitchen-sink drudgery and banality of those days spent cooking, housecleaning, and online, but while I could personally relate to surviving months of Groundhog Days, I didn't want to relive them, and these characters' experiences with loneliness and isolation just felt flat and banal to me.

In real life, I would have immediately leapt to sanctimonious judgment about brazen breakers of the Covid rules who thoughtlessly inflict their virality upon the old, infirm, and immunosuppressed, in radical denial of the common good. But I will admit found some measure of empathy for Kate, a vegetarian hippie who doesn't fit the profile of the right-wing anti-masker next door.

Thanks to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sharing an ARC of this in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.