MixedThe New RepublicThrasher writes of his book as a journey, an invitation to travel alongside him as he puts the focus back on the members of the viral underclass. It is also an exploration of what viruses have taught him about the dangers and the necessity of vulnerability, of how they have \'drawn [him] around the world,\' how they showed him that he \'could love (and mourn) more deeply\' than he \'ever knew was possible.\' Here is the possibility contained within the framing of the viral underclass: that viruses bind people together, even as they do not take from all of us in equal measure ... I am not so certain of the power of the virus...Thrasher, for his part, narrates a life lived across whatever border divides the viral underclass from others. Yet there’s a tense parallel with those late–twentieth-century accounts of the underclass, the ones that imagined the urban landscape as another country populated with people utterly unlike its great explorers. The virus retains the power to reinforce those class boundaries, the ones across which we are not meant to have contact ... It’s understandable to look in the virus for a crisis so widespread and persistent, requiring such a thoroughgoing response, that it would bring about a more just, more caring world. A remarkable quality of Thrasher’s book is his attentiveness to injustice on a large scale as well as in its most intimate forms. He is most persuasive when he makes the case for urgent change, envisioning a society that doesn’t force people to expose themselves to sickness in order to survive. It will take more than our shared experience of the virus to get us there.
