Understanding Richard Russo

Chapter 1: Understanding Richard Russo

chapter 1 Understanding Richard Russo The thing that I would say about literature in general, the thing that I love most about it, is that when I’m in the world of a gifted writer I’m able to see that world through that writer’s eyes, not my own. —Richard Russo, interview with Robert Birnbaum, Identity Theory In the introduction to The Story Behind the Story (2004), an anthology of short fiction that includes authors’ explanations of how their stories came about, Richard Russo recalls the countless times he has been asked if he thinks writing can be taught or if writers are just “born this way.”1 Such questioners, Russo posits, seem to be asking if some innate difference separates writers from nonwriters or if we all start out essentially the same. Russo responds to this question with a bit of a dodge: “The unsatisfactory truth of the matter—and most readers suspect this—is that we’re both the same and different” (10). Perhaps fittingly, this paradoxical concept of being simultaneously the same and different pervades Russo’s body of work at many levels, particularly concerning his position as a successful writer doggedly reckoning with his experiences growing up in the small industrial town of Gloversville, New York. In many ways Russo is the same as the men and women who live and work in the circumscribed environment of a Rust Belt factory town, struggling to support their families and build satisfying lives; he was raised among leather workers and understands intimately the frustrations and joys of life in a close-knit, dead-end community. Yet he is also undeniably different . As a young man, Russo fled Gloversville for college in Arizona, rarely returning after his graduation, and created for himself a life indelibly colored by his past but not exclusively defined by it. He can write about small-town, working-class men and women in fictional towns such as Mohawk, North 2 Understanding richard rUsso Bath, Empire Falls, and Thomaston because he knows, authentically, what their lives are like. At the same time, his many years away from Gloversville, living and working in college towns all over the United States, give him a personal and narrative perspective that is undeniably different from those of the folks he left behind. He is truly both the same and different from the people who filled his childhood and who populate his novels. James Richard Russo was born in Johnstown, New York, on July 15, 1949, the only child of James W. “Jimmy” Russo and Jean Findlay (LeVarn) Russo. He grew up in the nearby town of Gloversville, which was known during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for its production of fine leather goods, particularly gloves. Russo’s maternal grandfather was a glove cutter who moved to Gloversville from Vermont, and his paternal grandfather, a shoemaker in Italy, immigrated to Gloversville in order to join the industrial boom that the town was then enjoying, but unfortunately would not enjoy for much longer. Russo’s father, a World War II army veteran , worked part-time as a glove cutter until he was laid off. He began drinking heavily and left his family when his son was very young; from that point he made his living working on road construction crews.2 Russo’s mother worked first as a telephone operator and then at General Electric’s computer room in Schenectady, an hour’s commute from Gloversville, “loading and unloading large wheel-like tape drives onto a computer the size of a bus.”3 As a single mother, Jean Russo attempted to maintain a certain level of independence , but she did rely heavily on her parents and then, later, on her son for both financial and emotional support. Russo grew up in a modest but comfortable two-family house on Helwig Street in Gloversville owned by his maternal grandparents, with whom he was close. His grandparents lived in the two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment on the first floor, and he and his mother shared the upstairs, identical apartment. Russo fondly remembers his grandfather, a veteran of both world wars, who suffered and died from emphysema no doubt caused, at least in part, by the dusty, toxic rooms where he worked cutting leather for gloves. But, as Russo recounts, his grandfather never held the tanneries responsible for his illness and instead maintained that despite the dangerous conditions of the factories, “the glove shops had put bread on his family’s table...