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By now, we can all spot the symptoms: that little tickle in the front pages, some congestion along the dust jacket, a certain stiffness in the spine.

It’s already too late: You’ve got a full-blown covid novel.

There’s no cure except to spend the next three or four days in social isolation until it’s finished. But honestly, if it’s as good as Regina Porter’s “The Rich People Have Gone Away,�� you won’t mind quarantining.

That’s a particularly astonishing accomplishment considering that just four years after the virus came to these shores, we’re already packing up the covid-19 pandemic in the memory chest that holds the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918. But Porter’s witty new novel, the follow-up to her 2019 debut, “The Travelers,�� is bold enough to wave away the gathering fog of amnesia. She reminds us of madly wiping down the kitchen, walking along eerily silent streets, tensing up when someone joins us in an elevator, arguing with unmasked boors who did their own research, googling “where to find toilet paper,�� hearing the word “intubation�� for the first time and then learning that there aren’t enough ventilators.

Of course, if the only thing “The Rich People Have Gone Away�� had to offer were a stroll past a line of refrigerated morgue trucks, I’d tell you to avoid it like the plague. But Porter is doing so much more in this surprisingly delightful and challenging novel. She holds the covid pandemic up to the light and uses it as a prism to separate the mingled wavelengths of American society. The virus itself may not have discriminated, but it was endured by different kinds of people in tragically different ways. You can see some of that illumination right in the title, which nods to the panic that sent moneyed folks scurrying away from cities. But she’s equally interested in the way covid interacted with a much older and more pernicious virus known as racism.

In the opening pages of “The Rich People Have Gone Away�� �� April 2020 �� Theo Harper’s apartment building in Park Slope is so empty that he can enjoy having sex in doorways on the ninth floor. That’s a fair marker of the man’s brazenness and his liminal nature. Porter narrates in a bifurcated tone that channels Theo’s egotism while also holding him at the end of a pin. It’s a technique that renders him both fascinating and repugnant. He’s a. . . .

To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post: