scott lax extra

More from Scott Lax’s conversation with author Mary Doria Russell. For more about Russell’s novel, Thread of Grace, pick up the July issue of Northern Ohio Live.

Scott Lax: As an author who came to this craft somewhat late in the game, you hit back-to-back home runs with your first two literary science fiction novels, became world-famous, were talked and written about in the same breath as the giants like Arthur C. Clarke and Ursula K. Le Guin. You had a growing legion of science fiction fans from around the world. So did you churn out another SF book for your fans? No. You went and wrote a historical novel about World War II, The Italian Resistance and the Holocaust –

Mary Doria Russell: And I just finished a fourth novel about the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference – that’ll be out next March. So two science fiction novels and then two 20th Century historicals. But I'm really hoping to solidify my reputation as a total genre slut with my fifth novel – it’s a murder mystery set in Dodge City in 1878. A genre twofer, with Wyatt and Doc!

SL: You don’t exactly take the safe route, do you?

MDR: Oh, but I do. In real life, anyway. I’ve been married for 37 years, in a row, to the same man. I save our money and invest regularly in low-cost balanced mutual funds. I eat sensible meals and wear my seatbelt and get yearly mammograms. I exercise. Okay, I don’t really exercise, but I do run up and down three flights of stairs about 30 times a day. That counts. I’m very risk averse in real life.

On plunging into the unknown as a writer:

In the past 12 years, I’ve found out that when I’m startled and intrigued by something, about half a million other people will be fascinated, too. That’s enough for a bestseller.

Personally, I think it’s a dopamine thing – it’s like falling in love, that sense of discovery and fascination and wanting more. I get a brain-chemical rush when I find out something that makes me want to learn more, and then I start figuring out how to convey the knowledge in a story with good characters.

Thrill junkies get that rush from physical risks. Drama junkies get it from falling in and out of love. I need it mentally, I guess. 

And I don’t get that rush from retracing my steps. If I’ve already written about something, there’s no dopamine flood to keep me going.  So I don’t go back to characters or situations or genres or even styles, when I’ve learned all I want from them.

SL: You delve deeply into the human condition by examining the larger concepts of life such as religion, medicine, science and war. You cross national boundaries, languages and even – in your first two novels – the stars. You’ve done a tremendous amount of research on your subjects, and you’re a scientist. Obviously you care deeply about the world, about people, and you must think about the world we live in a great deal. Why do you think we humans have so much capacity for exhibiting a huge range of compassion and cruelty to one another?

MDR: Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out that we’re the only species that’s made the jump from prey to predator. Reading that in her book Blood Rites was one of those “I’ll be damned ...” moments for me. For most of our biological history, we were preyed on by leopards and wolves, and then at some point we made this huge ecological leap: we had the weapons and the motive to make our predators all but extinct.

She thinks that we still have that deep fear in us: we can easily become frightened and feel threatened. Our response is to band together, to circle and to defend the most vulnerable among us, like prey. But then we band together and go out to fight the wolves, like predators. When people go to war, we don’t say, “Let’s go kill and steal.” We say, “We must defend our way of life!” We begin as threatened prey and then organize to fight that which threatens “all we hold dear.”

Once a war has started, there is this drive to keep on fighting until the enemy is destroyed. Even if the war was a mistake in the first place, we go on fighting “so that these honored dead shall not have died in vain.” That can lead to deeply illogical and irrational decisions, but it’s so common in human history, across time and cultures, I have to think it’s part of us as a species.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately and I think that people distrust peace and prosperity and progress, and actually sort of dislike it. Without war, our lives are our own to do with as we please, and generally what pleases people is feathering their own little nests. We go to work and raise our kids, and make the car payments and mow the lawn and think about next year’s vacation. And as placid and pleasant as that is, we start to feel that it’s narrow, and small, and hollow.

When a war starts, it’s usually attractive and exciting after all that boring private peace.  “Yeah! Let’s go kick Saddam’s ass!” All that frustrating negotiation’s over. We get to release all that energy, and even if we aren’t in the armed forces, we watch exciting news coverage... War makes us feel significant, and gives a big important meaning to our small decisions, because this is history! Young people see it as a way to serve a cause larger than their own small lives. Instead of a thousand little questions, there’s one big question and one large and honorable answer. Will you serve? Yes, I will. It’s an honorable impulse. It can lead to acts of true valor.

But after a while, the violence and killing chars all those feelings, and it gets to be about kill or be killed. A few years later, the war itself looks stupid and pointless and endless, and finally peace begins to seem desirable again ... Round and round we go ...

On the political context of Adolf Hitler’s rise in Thread of Grace:

You’ve got to imagine the sudden excitement and a sense of movement and purpose [during Hitler’s rise]. And you’ve got to remember that he really did make life better for the majority of Germans. If he’d died in 1936, he’d be remembered as a great man who built the Autobahn and pulled his nation out of poverty and turned the page for Germany. His attitudes about Jews might only be a footnote – a nasty little oddity, like finding out that a beloved martyred president was banging Vegas showgirls two at a time.

When we look at the newsreels now, we think anybody could have seen what a nut job Hitler was, but at the time, in context, he was, by all accounts, a rock star.  He was sexually exciting to both men and women, perhaps because he was so sexually ambiguous. And he had a kind of physical frailty combined with emotional audacity that can also be remarkably attractive.  Whatever it was, it worked for a lot of people. Then suppose that you’re a German veteran of the Great War who finally got a job on the Autobahn after being out of work for three years, that maybe you’re eating better now, and it’s not humble pie any more ... Well, it starts to make sense that Hitler would be popular.

Sure, there were those who saw him for what he was, but think about it: we’ve all had the experience of being deeply suspicious of the motives and character of one of our last two presidents. There were elections we have serious doubts about, disastrous decisions we’ve hated or despised. Right wing or left, either way, despite our strong misgivings, we didn’t go into the streets. We watched it all happen on CNN.

So I can’t flatter myself that I’d have been any more moral or courageous or farsighted in 1932. I understand how a lot of Germans who knew better watched it all happen. We don’t even have their excuse: there aren’t any gangs of brown shirts roaming the streets beating people up if they don’t toe the party line. 

My feeling is, unless you’re in Darfur right now fighting the Janjuweed, you’ve got no room to sneer. You need to be very humble about your own moral and political righteousness.

SL: What do you think the US, and the world, might look like in 2017?

MDR: Oh, my ... Well, I’m not feeling that we’re doomed, but I’m not especially cheery either. I have this vision of America as the France of the 21st century. We’re bankrupt now. We just don’t know it. Our debt – international, national, personal – is so huge, we’re like a cartoon character running in midair. Eventually we’re going to look down and realize we’re not standing on anything, and we’ll plummet. I expect the US will print money to inflate its way out of debts, and that’ll kill us in the international bond market. China will dump dollars ... The stock market will tank. People like me who saved all those years will be wiped out, too, but at least nobody will repossess my house.

So pretty soon, we’ll end up like France. We’ll be total ciphers politically, a washed-up ex-empire, but we’ll still be jumping up and down and yelling, “Pay attention! We used to be important! We used to be somebody!” China and India will just roll their eyes and snigger at us.

The book I turn to when I’m trying to understand America’s history or its future is Generations by Strauss and Howe. They’ve identified a rolling four-generation pattern that goes back to the 1500s, and they’ve gone out 100 years from now.

I’m a scientist by training, so I’m always impressed when theorists can make predictions correctly, so get this: Strauss and Howe predicted in the late ’80s that an uncompromising Boomer president with an apocalyptic view of good and evil would lead the nation into a world war for ideological reasons. When I read that in 1991, I thought, “No way. We had our war. We did Vietnam, thanks, and that’s enough for us.”

To my horror, that’s turned out to be an eerily accurate prediction. So I am also heartened by their prediction about my son’s generation. Structurally, the Millennials coming of age right now are very much like the Greatest Generation of World War II, and I can see the parallels developing as these kids get older. They’re focused, serious, self-motivated, and pragmatic. I think we’ll all be in good hands, and I can’t wait for my own generation to get the hell out of their way.

SL: You’re a Jew by choice and conversion, not by birth or marriage. You have a unique perspective on Judaism. Why do you think Jews are so loathed throughout history?

MDR: I don’t know that we’ve always been loathed necessarily, but we certainly have annoyed the daylights out of others ... You know, I really do think that there’s something fundamentally irritating about the fact that Jews are Jewish.

I mean, you have a billion Christians who believe that Jesus is the Messiah foretold by Jewish scripture, and here are these damned Jews saying, “Um. No. Not really, because, see, you’ve got a lot of the translations wrong, and anyway, the Messiah is supposed to usher in world peace, and Jesus didn’t do that, and we’re sorry, but he doesn’t get a do-over at the Second Coming.”

And you have a billion Muslims who believe in Abraham and Sarah and the ineffable God who foretold the fate of Abraham’s son Ishmael, and who spoke to the prophets as recorded in Jewish Scripture, and they believe that same Deity dictated the Quran to Mohammed, and that’s God’s final word on how to live and what to believe. And here are these damned Jews saying, “Well, sure, maybe, because who are we to tell God who He can speak to? But the Quran doesn’t change our Covenant.”

There are a lot of more specific historical issues I could list, of course, but right there, you’ve got two billion people who are annoyed because 24 million Jews persist in being Jewish. At least the Buddhists and Hindus aren’t ticked off at us. That’s something.

On combat veterans:

World War II combat veterans, men who’d kept silent so long, have begun to write or speak a little of their lives. Many of them started autobiographies after Saving Private Ryan made it possible for them to imagine telling people about what they went through. A guy like that might be 87 years old, married for 65 years to one woman, with children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren ... When he writes his autobiography, his family is shocked, but not by the terrible things that happened in the war. They’re shocked by how little they themselves figure in his story. They are asides, asterisks, footnotes in the story of his life. The war is his reality. And the wives and sons and daughters feel that. Each war distorts family dynamics for a couple of generations at least.

SL: You’ve enjoyed and endured the same kinds of family joys and difficulties as your readers. Clearly, your own family is very important to you. What has family meant to your writing?

MDR: Oh, it is such a cliché, but it’s true: my family is the most important thing in my life. My husband has been the heartbeat of my life since I was 15 years old. My son is engaged now, and I have this glorious new daughter – I call her my honey-in-law! I am so ready to be a grandma! It’s only because my family is so solid and stable and sustaining that I have the mental and emotional energy to write.

At the same time, a failed relationship with my mother probably made me who I am. I wish things had been different between us, but the pain was not wasted. I’ve put it to work in a lot of ways.

On predicting the future:

But probably my most prescient moment was when I wrote about “a president from Texas so dumb he couldn’t pour water out a boot if the instructions was on the heel.” That was back when Ann Richards was governor of Texas, too, and the whole idea of Texas Republicans seemed quite improbable!

Pick up a copy of Northern Ohio Live at your favorite newsstand or subscribe online now. No credit card required. We’ll bill you later.