Customer Reviews

The Whore's Child: Stories

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I teach at a large university and had recently spent a lot of time among academics, learning and thinking about literary and critical theory. I love that stuff for the avenues of understanding it can make available to us and for the depth it can add to our favorite books. But spend enough time in Theory-Land and among the examples its inhabitants trot out, and you start to believe that there's no place anymore for a good story, well told. Well, Theory-Land is a nice place to visit, but I've no interest in living there, and thankfully The Whore's Child brought me back.

These are, simply, great stories. And I use the word "simply" here paradoxically, because there is absolutely nothing simple about creating characters on a page that come alive with all the complexity and mystery of real people whose lives we can enter at their most revealing points. This is not to say that Russo does not experiment with form, because he does--the title story is essentially a story within a story, showing us large chunks of a student writer's manuscript; the last story is told through numerous facets of a young boy's consciousness in one of the best evocations of youthful understanding and misunderstanding I've ever read--but unlike so much "cutting edge" writing these days, Russo's experiments in form are always secondary to the story itself. One never gets the feeling that he's impressed at his own cleverness, winking over his shoulders at the other literary theorists also "in the know".

Read Empire Falls for the evocation of a small town and the way that town's character intertwines with the characters of its citizens; read Straight Man for the send-up of Academia and the often caustic humor of the first-person voice, both obscuring and revealing a tender and surprisingly idealistic core. But for the range of genius possible in unself-conscious narrative, for the depth of feeling that good writing can provoke, for the precise niche of character that is the hallmark of literary fiction, I can think of no book I've read recently that matches The Whore's Child.

I'm a huge fan of Russo's work, and have read all his books, some more than once. The way Russo creates characters that I can identify with, in the midst of banal situations, is a rare talent.

So I naturally bought this book immediately. Russo, however, is a long-distance writer, not a sprinter. His stories don't give him the space he needs to develop characters. While several of the stories in this collection are gems, one cannot help but think that Russo could have taken them further - a few hundred pages further - and make novels out of them.

I'll still give this 4 stars because Russo is one of the finest stylests writing in English today, and has one of the best ears for dialog. A great writer, but not a great book.

"This . . . is what people mean when they refer to life as a great mystery," one of the characters reflects in this collection of stories (p. 109). Like Andres Dubus and Raymond Carver before him, Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Richard Russo succeeds at honestly examining "the great mystery" of American behavior in his first collection of short stories. Whether he's writing about marital infidelity or domestic abuse, Russo engages his reader with well-drawn characters and bittersweet epiphanies. In the title story within a story, Russo introduces us to Sister Ursula, an aging nun who, through a fiction writing class, discovers the "willful lie" she'd been telling herself over a lifetime (p. 21). In "Monhegan Light," an emotionally calcified moviemaker falls "truly in love" with his deceased wife only "through another man's eyes" (p. 52). In another story, we accompany a middle-aged academic, who is recovering from prostate surgery, as he runs his physically abusive son-in-law out of town. In "Joy Ride," a mother fleeing the perceived "slavery" of her marriage, takes her son on a "shabby" cross-country roadtrip, "devoid of glory" (p. 108). While some are stronger than others, these stories are satisfying overall.

G. Merritt

I'll admit this right up front. I was a little disappointed when I heard that Russo's latest release was a collection of short stories. I believe his novels are some of the best fiction being produced these days. Still though, I ran right out and got this collection--and that's where the disappointment ended. These stories are powerful and will stay with you. Russo is simply a wonderful writer and these characters and their lives will inhabit your imagination for some time after reading this collection. Enjoy.

The first story is worth the price of admission. The beauty of Russo's writing is that he's not afraid to use his own experience, to build himself into the character. Of course it helps that Russo's character is so likeable that it's easy to fall into the stories along with him.

Beyond all that, Russo has included two stories which are clearly re-workings of ideas from _Straight Man_ which has to be one of the best books of the last ten years.

I always wonder when a novelist takes on the short story. Russo tells good stories and while I wouldn't say these are on the par of Carver, Woolf, or Thom Jones, they are all certainly easier to get into and, in many ways, more likeable. Russo is one of our best writers and it's about time he was awarded such a distinction as the Pulitzer.

I'm always surprised at how many people I know (even writers!) who haven't read his novels, which do something rare in American literature: talk about the dirty, shameful topic of failure. He's a poet of it, whether of failed marital or parental relationships, or of careers and dreams. I enter his world the way I enter Balzac or George Eliot. There's a depth of social observation blending with psychological insight that no one else comes close to in contemporary fiction. He's not a flashy writer and he's not fashionably nasty or cynical--but he's rich, rewarding and deeply compassionate even of his fools. This collection has all those qualities, though I prefer his novels

Russo is a great story teller, with great insight into the emotional complexity of characters and the relationships that consume those characters. Most of the stories are about middle-aged men in difficult relationships and circumstances. There are a few stories involving children and important female characters as well.

At the most basic level, Russon can tell a narrative -- with a beginning, middle, and end that interests the reader and with a conclusion in which the story is resolved in a way that satisfies the reader. This is an essential skill that is ignored by more artsy and allegorical modern writers at their peril. But the stories also serve a purpose. Russo has a great heart with empathy for his characters, and each story reveals something about human nature that I somehow find satisfying. Some endings are whimsical and happy, like the final lengthy story about a young boy's baseball season the occurs during his parents' estrangement; another involves the complexities of a marital relationship and the knowledge and affection unique to the long-married; and others explore the essential failures at the heart of many relationships.

The first story -- "The Whore's Child" -- is wonderfully complex in its exploration of the nature of writing as mirroring the nature of lying to oneself and coming to terms with those lies.

I have never read anything by Russo, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel "Empire Falls." Based on his short stories, he is a writer of the first rank, and I'd like to read more.