Shhh, it's Russo

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo left his home in a small, upstate New York mill town decades ago, but he’s still a small-town boy. These days he lives in Camden, and “winters” in an apartment in Boston, where he says he transforms his two-block neighborhood into a small town, too. He parks the car and walks. Much like he walks to the Camden Deli each morning when he is home and any coffee shop he can find when he is not. He writes by hand and then returns to enter the words each afternoon and begin the reshaping of the morning’s output, until he has crafted beautiful sentences and real characters in a world that recognizes that delicate balance between free will and destiny.

Russo is the author of seven novels, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, the Pulitzer-winning Empire Falls, Bridge of Sighs, and the just released That Old Cape Magic. He has also written a short story collection, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, and a dozen or so screenplays.

In his fiction he returns to Gloversville, New York, not literally, but emotionally, over and over again, mining the life he lived, the people he lived it with, and the community by which all of it was shaped. He grew up in the second floor apartment of a two-family home his grandfather bought shortly before Russo’s parents split up. His aunt and uncle and his cousins lived a few doors down the street. Every summer day he left the house with his baseball mitt, reappearing only for meals and bedtime. And all of it continues to provide grist for the compelling stories he writes of people with deep inner lives.

His mother was hell-bent on him getting an education, and part of that education, he felt, included getting as far away as possible. After receiving his BA, MFA, and PhD from the University of Arizona, he taught at the University of Southern Illinois, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and finally Colby College, where for years he divided his time between teaching and writing. But when Robert Benton made the movie of Nobody’s Fool, it changed Russo’s life: His readership exploded; he started writing screenplays; and he was able to write full-time. The friendship also changed his “artistic behavior.” Always a solitary writer feeling his way alone in the dark “along the walls of the cave,” he became, he says, a collaborator, engaged in passionate conversations about writing and craft, with smart, funny people trying to make everything come together in the 120 pages of a screenplay. And he loves it.

In an industry that can be unsettled and crazy-making, Russo has a career that he describes as a “sea of tranquility”: same agent, same publishing house, a couple of editors. Good thing because the writing plate is full. The guest editor for this year’s Best American Short Stories, he’s also developing a pilot for HBO, and is working on a new novel that revisits the world of Nobody’s Fool.

Your books deal primarily with how families shape us. How did yours shape you?

I’m coming to realize That Old Cape Magic is an exercise in answering that question. It’s a book about inheritance, with a capital I, all of the things we inherit, not just what’s in the will. I’ve always been fascinated by destiny. What in our lives is hard wired? What do we get to shape and what is shaped for us? As I get older and hear things coming out of my mouth that once came out of my grandmother’s mouth or my grandfather’s mouth, or my mother’s or my father’s, I’ve come to suspect that we are all more haunted than we care to believe, and this book is a study of that kind of haunting.

Usually your books are epics, as long as 600-plus pages. That Old Cape Magic is your shortest book, by far. Intentionally?

Simple answer is I was writing a short story, and I lost control of it. The protagonist and his wife have had a tiff, and he heads off to the Cape earlier than she does, to scatter his dad’s ashes. And then halfway to the Cape, his mother calls him on his cell phone in the car. I had not anticipated her being in the story, at all. He pulls off the road, gets out for the conversation, and a seagull shits on him. His mother’s made a stationary target of him and suddenly everything is in play. And I realized 20 pages wasn’t going to do it.

[Writer] Annie Proulx has said that long after we finish one of your books we’ll see these “tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways and lurching through life” because your characters are so much like us. How do you do that?

I’m not sure I know. What I’m after in these stories is to go as deeply as I can and try as much as possible not to intrude myself. And when I revise—and I revise and revise and revise like most good writers do—I revise always with the hope of disappearing even more completely. People can think I’m a good writer after they’ve finished the book, but not while they’re reading it.

Why not?

If they’re thinking about me or my sentences, they are not in the story. I just want them to get into these characters’ lives, their fears, what haunts them, what they want. I want them to be so deeply into that world that when they come back up out of the book they get the bends.

You write character-driven novels. Why not plot-driven ones?

I like to write for the same reasons I read. I like to find out what’s going to happen next. With plot-driven vehicles, you really have to know where you’re going.

You don’t know where you’re going when you write?

No. Nor do I want to. And on those rare occasions when I think I know where I’m going, something better almost always turns up. It’s a little like being a cop. I’ve heard cops say the moment you think you’ve seen everything chances are you’re at a very dangerous place. You’re not watching carefully. You’re not alert to new things. Being complacent is dangerous for novelists, too—you have to be open to just the weirdest damn things happening.

Do place and class have equal weight in your books?

Class issues are far more important, but when you get the class things right, people often think you’re writing about place. I set Empire Falls in Maine. Mainers are notoriously territorial about their state, but they embraced the book, really because I got things right about class.

How would you describe the lens through which you see the world you’re creating?

Something happens when I sit down to write and I’m not sure what it is, but my writing voice, my attitude, is different from the person I am in my daily life—as husband, as father, as giver of dinner parties. I think the person I become when I sit down to write is tougher, much less willing to take things on faith—and this may sound paradoxical—but tougher and funnier.

Are you ever fearful that you don’t have another great story to tell?

I’m always working on something, and I have something bubbling behind it. It seems to be one book away so it’s not near enough to get under my skin. I can only worry about it in the abstract. I do worry about what a lot of writers have to worry about though, the day that you don’t realize that in some significant way you should have moved on. I think it’s particularly true of writers with strong voices and styles. Voice and style remain even when the stories go away.

Did you know early on you’d be a writer?

No, no, far from it. Being a good writer is something you try to do every day and at the end of it you just hope novel to novel to novel you can still say that. Even now, some days I think, “Yeah,” and other days I think, “I don’t know. I remember when I was a writer, but you should see what I wrote today.”