Full Disclosure: this blogger is more than halfway through The End of October by Lawrence Wright. His thoughts about the novel and the global pandemic are helpful to a reader struggling through the grim possible future for all of us. Wright suggests that the "new normal" is going to be the normal until a vaccine develops. Today's headline blared that the public health voices of Fauci and Birx were going home to shelter-in-place. If this is (fair & balanced) hard truth, so be it.
[x YouTube]
"The Liar Tweets Tonight" (Parody of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight")
By Roy Zimmerman and The ReZisters, featuring Sandy Riccardi
This genius parody has become this blogger's current earworm and Resistance Anthem. So, if this is a (fair & balanced) first step toward doing the right thing, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
What Lawrence Wright Learned From His Pandemic Novel
By David Remnick
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
A couple of years ago, I had lunch with my longtime colleague Lawrence Wright, who told me that he was writing a novel about a virus, a pandemic that strangles the globe. At The New Yorker, where he’s been on staff since 1992, Wright has written some of the most astonishing journalism of our time, including the reporting on al-Qaeda that helped form his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Looming Tower (2006), and his exploration of the cult of Scientology, which became the book Going Clear (2013). But that he was writing a novel was hardly surprising. Wright has written screenplays, one-man plays, and documentaries; he has acted under the direction of Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater; in Austin, where he lives, he plays keyboard for a damn good bar band called WhoDo. He long ago dispensed with anything routine. When he reached middle age, he once told me, he swore that he would take on projects only if they seemed fun or important.
Whatever he does, he does thoroughly. When it came time to do the fact-checking for his twenty-five-thousand-word piece on Scientology, the representatives and lawyers for that organization, faced with countless checking questions, asked for a meeting in New York. They got one. They arrived––four lawyers and a well-practiced spokesman who only looked like Tom Cruise––and presented to Wright, his longtime editor Daniel Zalewski, and our editorial team no fewer than forty-seven binders of material. I think the Scientologists expected to overwhelm Wright, and undermine the piece, with their three-ring binders of “proof.” What they did instead, under Wright’s gentle yet probing questions, was to add even greater substance to the piece. Each question seemed to yield yet another detail. It was the greatest act of journalistic jiu-jitsu that I’ve ever witnessed.
By the time Wright and I met for lunch and discussed his novel—The End of October, which is out this month [April]—he had already done the coast-to-coast reporting. He had met with epidemiologists, immunologists, microbiologists, security experts, vaccine experts, and public-health officials. He had read all the books, all the journal articles. And then he set about writing the story of a virus that, in the language of jacket copy, “brings the world to its knees.” There’s no question that the book was meant to be a thriller: diverting and fun. But it was also intended to be a kind of warning. The experts, Wright notes in a letter to the reader in the galleys of his book, “all share the concerns I’ve presented––that something like this could happen.” To read The End of October now is an eerie experience, even an unbearable experience, a warning after its time.
I spoke to Wright a few weeks ago [March 2020], when the era of quarantine was just around the corner. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Larry, your novel deals with the unexpected ways that an outbreak can influence not just the public health but culture and politics and economies. Are those second-order effects of a virus more dangerous than the virus itself? How would you equate that?
Well, they’re certainly more enduring. Viruses come and they sweep through a population. They may return, they may not. Whole cities were designed and built because of cholera, because of the need to have sanitation, clean water, and clean air. Now cholera is easily dealt with, but the effects of those plagues are still with us.
You began the research for this novel in a more innocent time. We weren’t in the middle of a pandemic. What gave you the idea to do this novel? What was the impulse for it?
Well, actually, it goes back to Ridley Scott, the filmmaker. He had read Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” which is this post-apocalyptic novel. Civilization has collapsed. And his question to me was, What happened? I always like it when someone offers me a question like that. And so I wrote a screenplay for him that was all about what could have cracked civilization. I thought there was one thing that seemed most likely, and that was a pandemic, something that’s built along the lines of the influenza of 1918, but in a modern era when the disease outpaces any attempt to pause it. And it was meant more as a cautionary tale for some future event, not something that would race ahead of the publication of this book.
What did you find particularly valuable to read?
What was most affecting to me were the interviews that I had. I went to the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda. I talked to immunologists at Pfizer. And I went to Fort Detrick, in Maryland, where a lot of the biowarfare research had been done. I was so struck by the ingenuity and the courage of people who work in public health. And that’s why the book is dedicated to them.
As a reporter, I’ve been in some dangerous situations. But, honestly, covering disease is something that I would really think twice about. War is frightening, but something like the Ebola virus, that’s far more terrifying to me. And people actually go into those situations and confront these very cunning ways that nature has of sickening and killing us. That really impresses me.
In your novel, the virus is one of your own imagining, not covid-19. Tell me about the virus in your book.
Well, I call it the Kongoli flu. I chose influenza as my medium because it is still the most dangerous virus that we’re faced with year after year. And I pictured it starting in Indonesia, in a refugee camp. Indonesia has been persecuting gay people, and I imagined that there was a camp, a detention center, where a number of people have H.I.V./aids and their immune systems are compromised. And, in that environment, a novel infection, a flu that has never been seen before, suddenly arises and takes root in the human population and becomes transmissible. There’s an attempt to quarantine the camp. But, in the novel, when the hero of the book, a microbiologist for the World Health Organization named Henry Parsons, goes to visit, his driver is contaminated and infected. And, right after that, the driver goes on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia for the hajj. And that’s how the virus really gets ignited.
What’s really uncanny is that the global political conditions in the novel are so much like what we have now. You’ve got the United States and Russia in conflict. Saudi Arabia and Iran are at each other’s throats. The threat of climate change is everywhere. And there’s a not terribly responsive President in the White House, though he doesn’t get named. What happens to that world when this virus is unleashed? And does it bear any resemblance to what you’re seeing every day now in the news?
You know, it is so demoralizing. I read the newspaper and I feel like I’m reading another chapter of my own book. And I shrink from it. All I did was pose the question: What would happen if we had such a virulent virus unleashed? How would it affect our economy? How would it affect our politics? And I just drew upon the trends. I just extended them. Unfortunately, real life seems to have taken the form to heart and outraced even some of my imagination.
How do you mean? What are you observing now in the reaction to this coronavirus that resembles what you might have anticipated?
Well, specifically, quarantine. Quarantine is not a cure by any means. Its only goal, really, is to forestall the advance of a disease so that time can be used to develop some kind of vaccine or cure. And I imagined three million people in Mecca, on hajj, quarantining—to me, that was a real leap of imagination. It doesn’t begin to compare with what China did with sixty million people in Hubei Province. And now Italy. My own imagination would have balked at such a stupendous effort. But, you know, that’s the world that we’re actually living in. I wonder, if I had written this novel after this event, how my approach might have changed.
Does it feel a little weird to have a novel coming out about a pandemic in the midst of one?
You have no idea.
Tell me.
In some ways, I have to admit, I’m kind of proud that I imagined things that, in real life, seem to be coming into existence. On the other hand, I feel embarrassed to have written this and have it come out. I don’t know what the world’s going to be like when it’s finally published, because this disease gallops along so much. I had a similar experience once before, when I wrote a movie called “The Siege.” It was about what would happen if terrorism came to America, as it had already in Paris and London. And that came out in 1998.
Three years before 9/11.
Yeah. But, you know, al-Qaeda’s assault on America really began that same year, in August, with the bombings in East Africa of American embassies. And then, after 9/11, it was the most rented movie in America.
Larry, why go at this subject in fiction rather than nonfiction?
Well, it had been conceived as a screenplay originally. And I started getting enchanted with the possibilities of creating characters who were dealing with an imaginary crisis, but one that still resembled the world in which we live. I could easily have written a speculative nonfiction book, but it didn’t arrest my imagination as much as the idea of doing it as a novel.
This isn’t the first novel about an apocalyptic pandemic. Some in the past have had a pretty familiar form. There’s a stable world. The virus throws that world into chaos. And then some brave souls defeat the virus, and things go back to normal. That’s not what happens in your book. Do those other novels get pandemics wrong somehow?
Well, there are enduring consequences. The Plague (1947), by Camus, is a good example of a book about a city under siege. After terrible devastation, the siege is lifted, and people go back to something like their normal lives. But there are residual effects of any great pandemic. Smallpox, plague––they affected the outcome of wars. They affected the mortality of humanity for years to come. We tend to think that, after the twentieth century, in which there were so many triumphs of medicine, we had put the great plagues of the past to rest, excepting, perhaps, influenza. But then along came sars, along came mers, along came these other viruses that posed tremendous threats. Fortunately, until now, we have been able to contain them somewhat, but they are incredibly dangerous.
Now, as you watch what’s happening, and obviously we’re still in the early stages, how do you evaluate the American reaction to the pandemic on a government level?
Oh, God. You know, let’s go back to when the Administration fired the global pandemic team, including Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, who had handled the malaria outbreak in Africa and helped save six million lives, and cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention so that they were no longer able to monitor health in most countries in the world. We were handicapped going out of the gate. And we handicapped ourselves even further. America is not a country like China that will easily lock up cities and partition states. The trust is going to be that people will take care of themselves. But I know this is not really going to happen. I think that people will isolate themselves. A lot of Americans are taking this very responsibly. But, still, I don’t think that there is another country in the world that can take those measures that China did.
Well, isn’t Italy doing something of the like?
They are trying to. But not with their army. They’re not building walls and shutting off streets on the same scale. Italy is making a gesture in that direction.
In a sense, what you’re suggesting is that there is an innate advantage to an authoritarian state like China’s over a democratic, fluid state like the United States in this kind of situation.
Here’s what I think about China. It does not like any criticism. It hides any kinds of interior problems it might have. We saw that at the beginning of this outbreak, when that young doctor made an outcry and he was suppressed. And, of course, he eventually died of covid-19. Previously, sars had broken out in China, and China hid that. And then it came back the next year, raging.
When World Health Organization authorities went to China to examine the situation, there were reports that the authorities placed sars patients in taxis and had them ride around until the WHO officials were gone. That is the downside of an authoritarian government––its attempt to suppress any kind of information that would help its population, and the rest of the world, protect itself. The other side of it is that a government as authoritarian and as brutal as the Chinese government can enforce a quarantine in a way that I don’t think any other country in the world would be able to attempt.
One of the striking things in your novel is that the first outbreak of the disease coincides with something else, something that seems even to dwarf it—a terrorist bombing, in Italy. Why choose to frame your story that way? What meaning might it have for us now?
When you have something like the virus outbreak that we have now, what happens is that it comes along with great suspicion. Where did this arise? Was it created? Was it man-made? If so, who did it? Who would do it? Right now, we’re seeing that Iran and Russia and China have tried to blame this outbreak on America. You know, something very similar happened with H.I.V./aids, when the [K.G.B.] blamed the United States for creating it.
What was your first thought when you heard about this outbreak in China late last year? Did you immediately think we could end up where we are today? Did you expect a different outcome?
I have written this novel, but I’m not a prophet. And good evidence of that is that I didn’t take any of the precautions that a person, given all the knowledge that I had, might have taken. Like so many people, I kept thinking, This isn’t going to affect me, it won’t reach my home—although, as it grew in China, we began to stock up on groceries and things like that, which I’m glad that we did. But I’ve been unnerved by it. I think it’s going to be a real challenge to our democracy, and it’s going to inflict a whole lot of grief on the world in one way or another.
One refrain that we hear a lot in the book is that we should have seen a pandemic like this coming. Journalists like Michael Specter and Laurie Garrett have been writing about this. These things happen with some regularity, in fact, and we should be better prepared. And, if that’s true, why aren’t we better prepared? What about our politics or national or international psychology works against that?
Well, I think that during the Obama Administration, there was an attempt to create a pandemic responsiveness. There’s an emergency supply of medicines. But they’re all inadequate to the task. I don’t think that our government was able to envision the kind of sweeping rapidity with which a novel virus can take hold of a population. We really need far more hospital beds, far more respirators, not just some gloves and a mask. We need places for isolation for people who are infected. Those things just don’t exist. And, if we had invested in them, I think that there would have been a reaction against the expenditure of money on the possibility that something like this might happen.
When you say there is a threat to our democracy with COVID-19, what do you mean?
I think let’s start with just the difficulty of having politics in a place where people can’t assemble. What’s going to happen with the conventions? Or voting? How are we going to manage those kinds of things?
What is the best thing a politician in the midst of a campaign could do and say at this time?
Well, I think that these campaigns should become virtual. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have mass rallies. If you’re going to encourage people to be responsible, the best thing is to tell them to stay home, wash their hands, practice social distancing if they have to go out––everything that everybody’s already heard. Discretionary travel should be held off until a time when it’s safer to go out.
What advances can we hope for to improve our circumstances? Or are we doomed to wait on a vaccine?
Oh, we’re definitely doomed to wait on a vaccine. It’s going to take another year before there can be a vaccine that’s properly tested and then scaled up to millions and millions of doses. In the meantime, there are other things that can be done. You can do blood transfusions from survivors, but that, of course, is dangerous, because there might be other infections. There is something called monoclonal antibodies, which can be developed. That gives you a few weeks of resistance, but it’s not a permanent solution. There’s what’s called a replicant virus. If scientists can make something that looks like a coronavirus to the body’s immune system but is not actually a virus, then they might be able to create some kind of vaccine built along those lines.
In the days of smallpox, there was what’s called variolation. Usually, smallpox passes into the lungs, where it becomes dangerous. But suppose it entered the body in another way. Variolation is where you would take a scab from a smallpox victim and insert it into an incision on your body and cover that, so that you get smallpox in your body but your body has a different way of dealing with it. This is what America did when George Washington ordered all of his troops to be inoculated—Washington, who was a smallpox survivor and an anthrax survivor as well.
What concerns do you have for publishing a novel into the teeth of this? Are you worried? Or do you think it can provide information that’s useful in a way?
I think it’ll make it understandable to people. I spent a lot of time describing the disease process and how we fight against these kinds of diseases. And, also, I think that some hope should come out of this novel. There really are incredibly ingenious, courageous people who are involved in fighting [pandemics]. And I have a lot of confidence in them. I am very sorry to see the C.D.C. be so crippled in its response. It had always been such a wonderful government agency, almost a model. And it’s gotten off to a very bad start in this event. ###
[David Remnick has been editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He has written many pieces for the magazine, including reporting from Russia, the Middle East, and Europe, and Profiles of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Katharine Graham, Mike Tyson, Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and Benjamin Netanyahu. Remnick began his reporting career as a staff writer at the Washington Post in 1982, where he covered stories for the Metro, Sports, and Style sections. In 1988, he started a four-year tenure as a Washington Post Moscow correspondent, an experience that formed the basis of his 1993 book on the former Soviet Union, Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993). In 1994, Lenin’s Tomb received both the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction and a George Polk Award for excellence in journalism. See his other books here. Remnick received a BA (English) from Princeton University (NJ).
[Lawrence Wright has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. He is also an author, screenwriter, and playwright.
In 1993, Wright published a two-part article in the magazine about recovered memories, titled “Remembering Satan,” which won the National Magazine Award and the John Bartlow Martin Award for Public Interest Journalism. He won another National Magazine Award for his 2011 profile of Paul Haggis, “The Apostate.” That article became a part of his book, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (2013). His history of al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), was translated into twenty-four languages and won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Parts of that book originally appeared in The New Yorker, including a Profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri, the then-current leader of al-Qaeda, which won the 2002 Overseas Press Club Award for magazine reporting. His most recent book is The Terror Years: From Al-Qaeda to the Islamic State (2016). Wright received a BA (English) from Tulane University (LA} as well as an MA (applied linguistics) from American University in Cairo.]
Copyright © 2020 [Condé Nast Digital
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License..
Copyright © 2020 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves
