LIFE AND ART

Musings on the author’s past, his life as a writer, and recent cultural topics.

Russo has done outstanding and widely acclaimed work in fiction (Empire Falls, Straight Man, the North Bath Trilogy) and has also written a strong memoir (Elsewhere), so a collection of personal essays written over the past several years sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. But it would take a slightly different set of essays and more scrupulous pruning to produce the version of that book a devoted admirer might imagine. Not much of interest is left to say about the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russo says some of it more than once. “There was simply no definition of essential worker broad enough to include a seventy-one-year-old novelist,” he posits early on, noting in a later essay that “it’s hard to argue that writers are essential workers.” The notion that “writers use people,” far from fresh and seemingly owned by Joan Didion, comes up in “Triage” and in later essays is deemed “probably worth saying again,” twice. Is it really the right time for an essay framed around “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid?” Which of Russo’s parents was right about America? This is one of the themes of a long essay, “Marriage Story,” that contains memoir material familiar to the author’s many fans, and much of it is reprised in a thematically adjacent essay titled “Ghosts.” On the other hand, those same readers are likely to enjoy Russo’s observations about the genesis of his story “The Whore’s Child” in “The Lives of Others,” his take on the fraught question of whether we must only write what we know. As he explains, he felt closer to, and prouder of, his octogenarian nun character than to his seemingly more autobiographical middle-aged writer—and breaks down exactly why and how.

Russo is quite a bit better than this collection would suggest, but completists will forgive him.