The writing life

Richard Russo, among my favorite authors, proves to be no less entertaining in his essays than in his novels. His The Destiny Thief (2018) should interest other hardcore Russo fans, as well as anyone else intrigued by how writers write.

In the title essay, Russo recalls being in a fiction workshop at the University of Arizona as a young man. His instructor told him he would never make it as a novelist and should stick with a career in teaching. A classmate, meanwhile, was hailed as a future star in the literary world. Instead that classmate never rose out of obscurity, while Russo won a Pulitzer for Empire Falls. He, probably like the other man, feels as if he somehow stole the other's destiny.

(I recently found something I wrote while in college about my creative writing instructor, Walter Tevis — author of The Hustler and The Queen's Gambit — telling me that, although talented, I would never make it as a fiction writer, but that because of my personality I would never make it in journalism either. He was right about the first, wrong about the second.)

Russo's way of mixing the comic with the serious helps explain why his novels are so endearing to many, and he explains his attitude toward humor in "The Gravestone and the Commode." At one time, he writes, he had one of each in his backyard. "The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering," he writes. "There's a door adjoining these rooms that's never completely closed."

Two essays focus on other writers. In one he writes about the difficulty of separating Mark Twain's fiction from his nonfiction because Twain put so much truth in his stories and so much invention in his supposedly true accounts. In another he describes The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens as "a jailbreak of the writer's imagination." It was during the writing of this book that Dickens let himself go to become the kind of writer he was destined to be.

Russo discusses in several of these essays the influence of his usually absent father on his life and on his fiction. His father was the model for perhaps his best-loved character, Sully in Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool, as well as for other characters in other books.

Good writing has at least as much to do with hard work over a long period of time as natural talent, the author tells us. His father was a union man. Union members pay their dues.