Richard Russo

'Chances Are' is a book where I found myself admiring the craftsmanship of the storytelling and nodding in agreement with observations on the relationship between memory and truth, the consensual fictions that sustain friendships, the reality of growing old and the distance between who I am now and who I used to be, but without finding myself immersed in the story and caring about the lives of the people. It was as if I stood in the shallows, admiring the beauty of the incoming tide without show more ever diving in.

I wasn't surprised at the craftsmanship. 'Empire Falls' is one of my favourite books and Sully from 'Nobody's Fool' has taken up permanent residence in my imagination, becoming someone that my wife and I refer to in conversations as if he were someone we'd once known and still think of. That Richard Russo is describing in those books a world more alien to me than some of the Science Fiction that I read and yet still brings them to life demonstrates just how good a storyteller he is.

So I've been pondering on why 'Chances Are' isn't joining my list of books that I happily recommend to anyone who'll listen.

I ought to be the target audience for this book. I'm the same age as the three men who, in their sixties, are meeting for the first time in many years in a cabin where they spent a memorable summer together in their youth. And a lot of it rings true to me. I nodded at the descriptions of the small discomforts and indignities of growing old, at the way in which we fail to update the mental image we have of someone we knew decades ago. Even though we accept that we've changed and grown older, we don't apply this knowledge to them until confronted with the evidence and even then we filter what we see through the expectations of our memory, looking for what has stayed the same.

The book also has an interesting mystery which is displayed and resolved with consummate skill as Richard Russo moves effortlessly between the past and the present and overlays the conflicting memories of the participants.

So...?

I think it comes down to two things: firstly the way in which the mystery is delivered means we never get inside the head of Micky, who is the most interesting of the three men and secondly, one of the men whose head we do get inside is so blah that I don't know why he's there or why the other men were ever friends with him. It's not that I dislike him. He's not interesting enough to rouse dislike. He's just someone who seems to rolled through his life, gradually becoming more conservative and more privileged and who seems almost free of the curse of introspection beyond occasional annoyance and some concern about whether other people like him.

If Micky had been at the centre of this book, I'd have dived right in but joining in the mild angst of a realtor from Las Vegas who is much more privileged and much more conservative than he realises, didn't call to me. The most interesting thing about him was the woman he married and we never actually meet her.

'Chances Are' is still a well-above-average read, with some great prose, some interesting reflections and a good mystery in it. It just didn't match my very high expectations.

https://soundcloud.com/penguin-audio/chances-are-by-richard-russo show less

I've been thinking of reading this author for some time, and I'm so glad I finally did. The writing is delicious and accessible, and the characters in this story really stay with you. Sully is the 'fool' in the story, damaged by his childhood and a regrettable tendency to do exactly what he shouldn't, even when he knows his choices are wrong. But he has friends - his 80 year old landlady Beryl Persons, his on-again, off-again lover Ruth, his work partner Rub, his lawyer Wirf, his sometime show more employer Carl, his long-absent son Peter. He's nursing a bad knee, a broken family and a disability claim. But he is generous and even kind in his own way.

The town of North Bath in upstate New York is emblematic of the decline of small towns everywhere, when one inexplicable change can ruin an economy. But people stay, perhaps because their web of connections is strong.

I almost gave up on this book about 50 pages in, wondering why I should care about such a ne'er-do-well, self-destructive man, but my book group was reading it so I persevered, and not long after that became another of Sully's supportive friends.

There are two sequels - I'll be sure to read on. show less

The Parable of the Prodigal Son tells of an impetuous and extravagant young man who, after running off from home and squandering his considerable inheritance, is welcomed back with open arms by his rejoicing father. Unfortunately, there is no such redemption for Miles Roby, the protagonist of Richard Russo’s affecting novel Empire Falls, whose mother Grace carefully plots for him to leave home for college as a way of escaping a dead-end existence in Empire Falls, Maine, the small, show more suffocating mill town in which they live. When Grace’s illness forces Miles to drop out of school and return to Empire Falls, it is very much against her will and creates a rift in their relationship that lasts until the day she dies. Twenty years later, Miles is indeed trapped in the same decaying environment, running a diner for the scheming town matriarch while trying to raise a precocious teenage daughter without much help from a self-absorbed ex-wife and an itinerant rogue of a father.

That may not sound like the plot of a particularly uplifting tale, but for this capable writer it provides the source material for a hilarious and deeply insightful book. As anyone who has read his work before can attest, Russo has a great affection for his characters—and there are a lot of characters worked into the 500 pages of this novel—as well as a wonderful talent for creating realistic dialogue. The story moves along at its own well-measured pace and manages to invest the reader in what happens to the people of Empire Falls without ever lapsing into a cloying sense of sentimentality. To be sure, drawing sympathetic portraits of the denizens of a down-and-out industrial city in the northeastern part of the United States is ground the author has tilled successfully in the past (e.g., The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool). Still, Russo is just so good at what he does that, for me, the stories never seem repetitive or forced. In fact, while he won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for this one, that award really could have gone to any of three or four of his other novels instead. Russo truly is among the very best novelists we have. show less

Four stories: three hits and a miss. Much of Russo's other short stories and novels deal with academics or working class heroes, and Trajectory continues his track record of brilliance, humor, and insight. The first story is the only one told from a female perspective and it's very grim and full of male characters who are much more intriguing than the narrator. The second and third stories both involve pairs of brothers, in varied situations and settings, who drive each other crazy with show more obtuseness, jealousy, and misunderstandings. The last and most amusing tale is that of a Hollywood screenwriter who, though beloved by a Paul Newman type actor (and Russo and Newman had a very strong relationship through Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls), is challenged by a Robert Redford-ish older leading man to re-activate a long dead screenplay for him after the Newman figure has died.

Russo is a humor writer above all. Quotes:

"The general impression she conveys is of a woman who once upon a time cared about how she presented herself to me, but woke up one morning, said fuck it and was immediately happier."

"Nate has belatedly come to understand life is, seemingly by design, a botched job."

"I always thought I was special." It was an odd, in some ways startling, admission. There were any number of people who clearly felt like this, but the sentiment was seldom given voice."

"People cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom."

"I was afraid to engage again, even at a distance, with a heart and mind so compatible with my own."

"Put simply, I'd wanted more happiness than I had coming. Wasn't its pursuit my inalienable right? But of course that's just another way of asking, Why shouldn't we have whatever we want?" show less