I should imagine that in 2020, it was tempting to read Sarah Pinsker’s novel A Song for a New Day (2019) based on what it got right, rather than what it was doing. I don’t know that I’ll succeed entirely in avoiding the former, but seven years after its release, I can confirm the latter — what it was actually doing — is still pretty darn good.
A Song for a New Day takes place on either side of a pandemic — and yeah, imagine launching a novel involving a pandemic into an actual pandemic. (That must have been author’s nightmare.) As such, its speculative furniture focuses on the repercussions of that pandemic on the world: legally, culturally, psychologically. But the science-fictional furniture is really secondary to the actual subject: the power of live music to connect, to change, to liberate. In the “Before” times, Luce Cannon is a young rock artist on the verge of stardom, touring with her band across the United States. She’s just getting the feel for this life when monumental events — including a deadly disease known as “the pox” — send the world into lockdown, turning her from a promising newcomer into a one-hit wonder. Alternating with Luce’s story is that of Rosemary Laws, a naïve young coder in the “After” times who survived the pox and now lives a cloistered life with her parents, providing remote tech support for an online retailer. Rosemary’s exceptional customer support gets her invited to a virtual concert, sending her down an unexpected new career path: serving as a talent spotter for the megacorporation that has cornered the market on concert streaming. Since anti-congregation laws have killed live music, finding new acts involves venturing into the physical world for the first time, but it’s not just an exciting new underground music scene that Rosemary discovers.
Sure, there are elements of A Song for a New Day that didn’t work for me, but ultimately they’re irrelevant to the ways Pinsker’s pandemic differs from the one we’ve experienced. In 2026, the idea of a law-and-order society in which social interaction is restricted and people actually obeyed may seem unlikely, for example. But in the moment Pinsker’s oppressive lockdown was a reasonable guess, and anyway it drives an engaging story, one less about the what-if backdrop than the search for artistic authenticity in a capitalist society hellbent on commodifying art. Pinsker’s “After” is a commentary on our own world: the cold impersonality and crass monetization of our online lives, the middleman value extraction of the entertainment business, the power imbalances created by market concentration, the struggles of the starving artist to balance vision against commercial survival. All worthy themes, adroitly handled. On the world-building level, alas, for me the novel lacked the specificity to be entirely convincing. By omission, questions are raised: about the future’s broader internet culture, the pox, the terrorism, and whether the risks are ongoing or merely a lever for government and industry control. But the foregrounded character interactions are lovely, especially in Luce’s chapters, and Rosemary’s coming of age — into a world that has traumatized and isolated her generation — strikes me as a legit attempt to understand what modern young people must be going through in the unending crises of the 2020s. Elements didn’t quite sing for me, but there’s also so much to admire, especially its flowing, effortless prose and its obvious passion for music.
