The Whore's Child by Richard Russo: 5 of 5

Maybe I'm too generous, but it really feels like I have been getting lucky with the books I have been reading lately.  The Whore's Child is no exception, and it continues my recent love affair with the short story.  I only know Richard Russo from Empire Falls and this awesome interview from The Rumpus.

Empire Falls was a great novel, but The Whore's Child captured my imagination in more diverse ways.  Each story, told in straightforward prose, is populated by a wholly different set of characters.  The only real thing the stories have in common are a general Northeastern American setting.

In the titular first story, Russo's description of the nun calls to mind in perfect detail her presence in the narrator's advanced creative writing class.  One can't help but imagine her finding some kind of happiness through her writing after a lifetime of bitter disappointment, but as the story unfolds - and with devastating finality near the end - she finds that she has been deceived by her own memory.  Like Wile E. Coyote left standing over the sudden void below, she has lost her foundation.  Russo depicts this loss not as earth-shattering cataclysm but as just one more bitter pill to swallow.  It hurts all the more for being anti-climactic.

In Joy Ride, the young narrator is afraid of who he may be slowly becoming.  In his quest to fit in, he recognizes that he may be giving up some important part of himself.  In education today, the talk frequently turns to metacognition, but this is the real deal - the awareness of who we are and the compromises we sometimes make to make our way in the world.  He wakes "in the middle of the night thinking about the dog [he'd] stoned, the long odds of its turning right when I threw, how dazed and stupid the animal had been to conclude I was its friend. All of which scared me so bad I couldn't stay in bed." (p. 84).  It dawns on him that if even his own parents could miss what type of person he was becoming, we could all potentially misjudge anyone, even the ones we love the most.

Russo's older characters also resonate; they are still vital people, but they are keenly aware of their ages.  As the narrator, observing both his relationship to his best friend and to life in general notes, "And so we sit, two friends on the downside of a notoriously slippery slope.  Fifty years old." (p. 155).  Life is far from over, but it has to lived just a little bit differently.

This is a great collection, full of things to think about.  I imagine reading them, for some reason, in front of some picture window by the sea.  It's about as far removed from where I really read them, but these stories do evoke place in a persistent if subtle way.