Unlike the Mary in the Farrelly brothers' film, whose attraction was primarily physical, what has made writer Mary Doria Russell so appealing to readers and book groups is that "there's so much meat for thought in her books," said Becky Anderson, co-owner of Anderson's Bookshop in Naperville and Downer's Grove, Ill. "We administer hundreds of book groups, and her books are favorite choices. At my personal book group—which has been going for 15 years—these are books we still bring up."
As a bookseller, Anderson's not concerned about the seven-year gap between Russell's first two books, The Sparrow (Villard, 1996; Ballantine, 1997) and its sequel, Children of God (Villard, 1998; Ballantine, 1999), and her forthcoming historical novel, A Thread of Grace (Random House, Feb. 1; audio from Random House Audio). If anything, she expects the audience to be even larger for Russell's new book, which is set in 1940s Italy. "We have so many customers who loved her first two books, I think they're just going to enjoy her writing. And we can sell any fiction on World War II."
It also helps that Russell's new book veers from speculative fiction, in contrast to her first two, which dealt with a Jesuit mission to other worlds. At the same time, Russell's fans may be pleased that Thread of Grace has many of the same themes, said Anderson. "There's a lot of talk of religion, faith and belief, even though you're not traveling to other galaxies." All three also combine multiple storylines, characters and nationalities. "Ninety percent of my work as a novelist," Russell said, "has been getting the various plots and character arcs braided together smoothly."
Finding Faith in Wartime
In A Thread of Grace, Russell—who describes herself as "Italian by heritage and Jewish by choice"—looks back 60 years to the Italian resistance movement in the fictional port town of Sant'Andrea, just outside Genoa, during the Nazi occupation. She chose the period and setting after reading Arthur Stille's Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families Under Fascism (Summit Books, 1991), which argued that Jews in Italy fared better than their European counterparts, in that most survived. But her research went well beyond that book, to encompass everything from aircraft mechanics to the role of the Church in Italy at the time. (Russell, who became a fiction writer after losing her academic job as an anthropologist and then writing technical manuals for a few years, provides a bibliography of the extensive research on which her novel is based on her Web site, marydoriarussell.info.)
A friend's story about an aunt who witnessed a Jewish roundup in Poland, where a young Jewish woman with a baby had just seconds to decide whether she should keep the child or hand it to an unknown woman, was another source of inspiration. Those kinds of quick choices involving acts of moral ambiguity are at the heart of A Thread of Grace, which received a starred PW review (Nov. 29, 2004) that described the novel as "moving swiftly, with impressive authority, jostling dialogue, vibrant personalities and meticulous, unexpected historical detail."
To reflect the arbitrariness of people's fates at the time, Russell tossed a coin to determine whether her characters would live or die, at her teenaged son's suggestion. "[Roberto Benigni's] Life Is Beautiful had just come out," said Russell, "and there were a couple other movies about how if you were plucky and courageous, you could survive. But it didn't make any difference: cleverness, braveness or how much you loved your children."
One of Russell's favorite characters in the book—the Nazi doctor Werner Schramm, who deserts the German army, helps the partisans and then puts back on his uniform—encapsulates the kind of ambiguity that intrigues her most. "I hope people really like Schramm," Russell said. "Of course, you have to remember that he killed 91,867 people. He has a conversion, after having just euthanized somebody." For her, his life raises the question, "How do you deal with a moral universe?"
A Question of Positioning
For Random House, the more pragmatic question is: How do you build a market for an author who switches genres? One way has been to play up the literary aspects of Russell's backlist. The Sparrow, which sold roughly 20,000 copies in hardcover and has close to 280,000 paperbacks in print, was nominated for a Book-of-the-Month Club First Fiction Award. The newest printing, which has just been released, doesn't include any mention that the book won an Arthur C. Clarke Award, and tries to whet readers' appetites for the new novel with an excerpt from A Thread of Grace. Even senior editor Susanna Porter, who began working with Russell in 1998, avoids describing Russell's earlier work as science fiction. "It's historical fiction that happens to be set in the future," she said.
Porter, who also acquired Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, believes that there's a large market for historical fiction that's "substantive and well-researched, almost like historical biography." Of course, in the case of A Thread of Grace, it doesn't hurt that the novel is set in World War II, which continues to be a popular time period. Philip Roth's most recent work, the alternative history The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin), is also set in the '40s and has been on the New York Times bestsellers list for more than a dozen weeks. But it's not clear that Russell's third novel needs all this positioning. As Judith Chandler, events coordinator for Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Wash., noted, "The Sparrow's a perennial seller. It's never been off the radar. This new novel is going to be like that. Mary isn't a women's writer or a men's writer; she has universal appeal. Her works are classics and they're destined to stay in print for a long time."
In any case, associate director of publicity Brian McLendon, who has worked on all three of Russell's novels, is finding it a lot easier to promote Russell's new novel that the last two. Whereas USA Today reviewed The Sparrow six months late, now even science fiction reviewers are telling him they'll find a way to review A Thread of Grace. And so many booksellers have requested Russell for signings that she is scheduled to do 25 events in 15 markets. In the late summer, Russell appeared at two regional conventions while Random House sent out 3,500 ARCs, including some to Jewish book clubs. The imprint also mailed 2,000 full-color announcement brochures to bookstores with registered reading groups and in February will do its first book-giveaway offer in Woman's Day magazine.
Russell, meanwhile, is already at work on book four. "What sort of scares me," she said, "is, this time I kill off all the narrator's relatives in the first chapter. I've got one straightforward storyline that goes from past to present, one first-person point of view, and everyone speaks English. Evidently, my subconscious would like to simplify life."
Though her son's departure for college has given her more freedom, the 54-year-old Russell is a member of the "sandwich generation," and continues to feel the strain of her mother's five-year battle with ovarian cancer and her dad's heart problems—even one of her dogs has a congenital heart defect. Russell's own health problems contributed to the delay for A Thread of Grace, at one point affecting her ability to read, much less write. The Hebrew saying she chose for the title of the book is also an apt description of her life during its writing: "No matter how dark the tapestry God weaves for us, there's always a thread of Grace."
