Wednesday, May 3, 2017

Two Old Coots, Russo and Ford

Collectively, Richard Ford and Richard Russo have been writing for 70 years.  Ford published his first novel, A Piece of My Heart, in 1976, and Russo his first, Mohawk in 1986. Between them they are known as master observers of ordinary lives who tell unadorned stories.  They each have new books this month, and characteristically each is blunt, tender and wise.  I know (believe me, I will be 69 in June) that aging white guys are out of favor in the literary world, and I don't begrudge that sentiment or the years of feeling overlooked that created it, but these two coots can still bring it, and they deserve our attention.

Russo, who turns 68 in July, has spent much of his storied career writing about small towns in the Northeast and their complicated inhabitants. His characters are funny, heartbroken, frequently inebriated, loaded with misplaced wishes and fully aware of their own short-comings. In addition to Mohawk he has written seven other novels including the Pulitzer Prize winning Empire Falls, and Nobody's Fool, and then just last year, Everybody's Fool.  The latter two are set in the fictional North Bath, NY and feature one of the great irascible charmers of American fiction, Donald "Sully" Sullivan, who was immortalized by Paul Newman in the 1995 film of Nobody's Fool.  

His terrific new collection of two novellas and two stories is called Trajectory.  Emotionally we are on familiar ground as his characters struggle to make sense of both the present and the ever-intruding past.  But these characters differ in that they are more firmly middle class types, teachers, retired professors, a high school principal, a writer/screenwriter, and in "Intervention", a seller of real estate recently diagnosed with cancer.  With Russo's characteristic warmth  the stories weave through webs of memory, silent long-held grudges, misunderstandings and complicated family issues. They each resolve uneasily, but with a hard earned bead of hope. 

 Here is an example of how he does it from near the end of the first story, “Horseman.”   A college instructor struggling with a student who plagiarized realizes it has brought up, again, a much examined period from her own student days.  Through the present struggle she starts to form a new perspective on her past.

In the other essay she'd find what Bellamy had noticed in hers, an absence.  An implied writer.  A shadow.  A ghost.  "But I do exist," she'd told him that day, however meekly, fearing he meant to convince her that even that wasn't true, when in reality he was merely urging her to discover that last elusive thing, a self worth being, worth becoming and finally worth revealing.  Yes, even though she knew what awaited her in those essays, she would at last read them.  She owed Bellamy that much.  He'd given her an assignment, and she intended to finish it.  After which, she suspected, he would haunt her no more.

In 1986 when Russo published Mohawk, Richard Ford, now 73, published his third novel, The Sportswriter. The title character's name was Frank Bascombe, and in him Ford found his most universal voice.
He wrote three other books with Bascombe at the center, and one of them, Independence Day, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. 

Ford's new book, Between Them, is a memoir of his parents.  "My Mother, In Memory" was written shortly after her death in 1981, and "Gone, Remembering My Father" is recent, finished a year ago, 55 years after his father's death in 1960.  These are beautiful haunted pieces.  They are filled with half-answered questions, surmise, and finally, a deep sense of mystery about these people who choose to have a child, him, quite late in the marriage.  Ford clearly loves his parents deeply and is grateful for the life he has that they provided, even indirectly.

He is a lover (as are many great writers) of the short stories of Anton Chekhov who in story after story validated the lives of ordinary men and women.  In this beautiful book, Richard Ford does the same for his parents.  He leaves an unsentimental record of two otherwise overlooked lives. Here is how he ends the memoir of his father,
But hardly an hour goes by on any day that I do not think something about my father.  Much of these things I've written here.  Some men have their fathers all their lives, grow up and become men within their father's orbit and sight.  My father did not experience this.  And I can imagine such a life, but only imagine it.  The novelist Michael Ondaatje wrote about his father that "...my loss was that I never spoke to him as adult."  Mine is the same--and also different-- inasmuch as had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become.  And while not to have written anything would be a bearable loss-- we must all make the most of the lives we find--there would, however, not now be this slender record of my father, of his otherwise invisible joys and travails and of his virtue--qualities that merit notice in us all.  For his son, not to have  left this record would be a sad loss indeed.
These are books by two deeply humane and uncluttered writers.  They have been working at the craft for many years.  They do "make the most of the lives they find", and we are the better for them

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