In “The Plague Year,” Lawrence Wright explores the missed opportunities and biggest mistakes.
It’s hard to read Lawrence Wright’s “The Plague Year,” his nonfiction account of how American scientists, doctors, politicians and citizens struggled to confront the coronavirus pandemic, and not think of his April 2020 novel, “The End of October,” which covers, well, much the same thing. In that fictional tale of a deadly virus spreading throughout the globe, the White House oscillates between confusion and indifference, conspiracy theories abound, health officials battle for influence, and economies melt down while self-styled patriots resist lockdowns. Oh, and a hapless president refuses to take responsibility and outsources management of the emergency to the former talk radio host turned vice president — like that would ever happen.
But as I worked my way through “The Plague Year,” an older book of Wright’s came to mind more often: “The Looming Tower,” a masterful journey down the roads that culminated in the 9/11 attacks. There, too, a gathering menace was ignored, experts were sidelined, and action was deferred until an unfathomable calamity was upon us. “The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was that no one took it seriously,” Wright wrote in that 2006 book. “It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” It was a peril that seemed unthinkable, “up against the confidence that Americans placed in modernity and technology and their own ideals to protect them from the savage pageantry of history.”
“The Plague Year” does not reach the heights of “The Looming Tower” — few books do — but a global pandemic is an even deadlier threat in that savage pageantry of history, one for which the United States could have been far better prepared. Wright’s new book is most effective at detailing the missed opportunities to keep things from going so wrong. “Tens of thousands of people were bound to perish,” he writes. “But perhaps not hundreds of thousands.” This is the story of how we got that extra zero. Continue reading.