The Whore's Child: and Other Stories [Hardcover]

Richard Russo (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 9, 2002

Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his best-selling Empire Falls—also named the year’s best novel by Time—Richard Russo now focuses, in his first book of short fiction, on a fresh and fascinating range of human behavior. With a fluency of tone that will surprise even his devoted readers, he captures both bewildering horror and heartrending tenderness with an absorbing, compassionate authority.

We warm to these newcomers—as to all Russo’s characters—almost despite ourselves. A jaded Hollywood moviemaker uncovers a decades-old flame he never knew he’d harbored. A precocious fifth grader puzzles over life, love and baseball as he watches his parents’ marriage dissolve. Another child is forced into a harrowing cross-country escape whose actual purpose he learns only after the fact. An elderly couple rediscovers the power, and the misery, of their relationship during a long-awaited retreat to a resort island. And in the title story, a septuagenarian nun invades the narrator’s college writing workshop with an incredible saga.

A masterful novelist here extends his versatility and accomplishment, in a collection that demonstrates yet again that “there is a big, wry heart beating at the center of Russo’s fiction” (The New Yorker).

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In The Whore's Child, Richard Russo's first collection of short fiction, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize-wining author of Empire Falls explores difficult emotional territory while retaining the assured wisdom and humor of his best work. Infidelity, self-reflection, and the fallibility of memory come into consideration in this entertaining and perceptive collection. The book's titular story sets the tone for the whole: an elderly nun crashes a college writing workshop and composes her own life story, sharing the details of her childhood growing up in a convent as the abandoned daughter of a prostitute. As her troubling story unfolds, the class realizes the fictions she has unknowingly imposed upon it. Other stories examine familial relationships and responsibility: the bittersweet "Joyride" follows the desperate road trip of a mother and son, each running from troubles they won't admit to. The collection's best and most lighthearted story, "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart," explores the daydreaming, curious mind of 10-year-old Linwood as he ponders the self-defeating behavior of his family, the desires of inanimate objects, and his perceived place at the center of the universe. Russo surveys these subjects with skilled ease and accuracy, communicating a quiet understanding of his characters and their personal yet universal concerns. Russo, like Flannery O'Connor, has a gift for conveying the absurdity and severity of everyday life with brutal honesty, humor, and compassion:

It was an awful place, but Lin understood it was as perfectly real as every place else in the world, which was large beyond imagining, containing every single place he himself had ever been or never would see in his entire life.

Uncommon in its natural insight, The Whore's Child recognizes the often unwelcome realities of experience and is all the more exceptional for it. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly

Russo's sterling reputation is largely due to his astounding ability to present the tangled emotions of troubled parent-child and marital relationships with comic verve, bracing clarity and dramatic tension fused with an undercurrent of pathos. These predicaments are well represented in the seven stories of his first collection, whose protagonists betray themselves and others in different social milieus. The brassy, flaky mother in "Joy Ride," who leaves her stodgy husband in Camden, Maine, and drives across the continent with her 12-year-old son in search of "freedom," may have much in common with the overbearing, intellectually pretentious mother in "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart," in which her 10-year-old son tries to fathom the implicit but inexplicable rules of adult behavior, but one woman is forced to admit defeat in the marital game, and the other is triumphant. In another case of parallel identities, the emotionally constricted college professor in "The Farther You Go" and the professor emeritus in "Buoyancy" must both acknowledge betrayal of their wives, not through deeds but as a result of their cold self-absorption. Ironically, the misogynistic Hollywood photographer in "Monhegan Light" learns a bitter lesson in Martha's Vineyard when he discovers his dead wife's decency in protecting him from knowledge of her longtime affair. The most memorable character here, however, is the title story's Sister Ursula, the daughter of a prostitute whose lifelong search for her absent father ends with a heartbreaking epiphany. Russo's rueful understanding of the twisted skein of human relationships is as sharp as ever, and the dialogue throughout is barbed, pointed and wryly humorous. The collection is a winner.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 225 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf; 1st edition (July 9, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375411682
• ISBN-13: 978-0375411687
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,178,889 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rick Russo is the author of six previous novels and THE WHORE'S CHILD, a collection of stories. In 2002, he received the Pulitzer Prize for EMPIRE FALLS. He lives with his wife in Camden, Maine, and Boston.
Photo credit Elena Seibert

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Russo has done it again!, July 12, 2002

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whore's Child: and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Feet to the fire, short stories often examine an author's ability to get to the core of a tale in a few pages. Russo is a hugely gifted author whose prior novels (like the Pulitzer Prize winning EMPIRE FALLS) are lengthy and packed with details that always illuminate every aspect of his characters and stories, but sprawl over the page like a river over the dam. Almost written (it would seem) to prove that he doesn't need a thick tome to capture his readers' imaginations, Russo here presents seven stories about wholy disparate subjects and manages to bring each tale to rich completion as though he had opened every door instead of just quietly peeking through the windows of the lives of ordinary folk and finding their secrets.
The title story is a deft a portrait of a old nun, married to God more by last resort than by preordained commmitment. In Bouyance we see the results of a long marriage literally on the rocks of an island resort and how the polarities of a life of misunderstanding can actually find some resolution in a remote and bizarre setting. Joyride takes us on a Mother/Son journey from Maine to New Mexico - an attempt to escape an unhappy marriage that only such a played out fantasy can repair. In another story another family reveals its dysfunction only when a trauma brings everything into focus, opening a door for renewal. To single out individual stories is difficult as they are all so well constructed that the task becomes one of selecting your favorite chocolate from a box of the best.

Russo writes so well that all of his characters are three dimensional. His technique of filling the interstices of background of each person, each event with bits and pieces of information placed throughout the story allows the reader to gradually and steadily become fully informed and completely involved with the short story genre. His characters and situations are painfully tangential to those we all live and observe and it is in this ability to hold a mirror to our own lives that he deftly yet tenderly engenders insight into life during the 21st Century. If you only know Richard Russo from his novel or the movies based on his novels, or even if you've never had these pleasures, READ THIS BOOK! One of the best of the year and one of the most reassuring followups from a man who has just won the Pulitzer!

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Similar stories crush this collection, January 29, 2007

By 

Gregory Baird (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whore's Child: Stories (Paperback)

Having enjoyed Russo's Pulitzer Prize winning novel "Empire Falls," I was eager to give something else of his a try. Maybe I should have selected one of his earlier novels instead because "The Whore's Child," interesting title aside, becomes tired and repetitive very quickly. The themes are the same in each story: aging male professor with an itchy prostate faces a mid-life situation, usually involving his younger second wife. That may sound too specific to relate to all of the stories in this collection, but you would be disappointed to realize that it is very accurate. The lone exception, and the novel's best story, is the titular work about a nun who is, in point of fact, a whore's child -- and the discrepancy between the generations makes for a poignant story. And yet, even that one includes a male professor character who is teaching the nun in his creative writing class, so similarities remain. Despite that, the story is great. The rest ... well, if Russo had done away with the other six achingly similar stories and expanded them into a single novella the book would have been much better. Russo is certainly capable of spinning a great yarn, and the themes are fine if a little familiar (Russo seems to be an author that excells in that domain). I just think you would do better to stick with the format best suited to his talents: his novels. I know that I will from now on.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A novelist's masterful short stories, February 17, 2003

By 

J Scott Morrison (Middlebury VT, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Whore's Child: and Other Stories (Hardcover)

Why is it, do you suppose, that short story collections don't sell as well as novels? And why is it that critics and readers seem often to look down their noses at the short stories of established novelists? In this instance, as much as I admire Richard Russo's novels, and I admire them hugely, I will have to enter a minority report and say that these heartfelt, lapidary short stories trump Russo's denser, more complex novels. Not that I'd want to be without the larger books.

Each story in this collection conjures up a world that seems real: one can see, feel, taste, hear the settings, and can get inside the minds and hearts of the characters. In a story like 'Monhegan Light,' we even come to understand probably the most elliptical character, the painter Trevor, in a few deft strokes of the storyteller's brush. As always, Russo's own great heart comes through in his tales.

Make no mistake, Russo is an important writer. And his short stories are as breathtaking as his novels.