Richard Russo: Trajectory

Soooo… I am not the hugest fan of collections of short stories.  There was a time I enjoyed them.  I used to read those Best Short Stories compilations.  Somehow I got over it.  I like the longer narrative.  I read the occasional short story in the New Yorker but it seems like every other one is written by some hot new Asian writer.  I don't know.  There are some good ones but I just kind of got out of the habit. I am not sure it is so different even when a writer I like comes out with a collection but… Richard Russo… definitely one of my faves… when he writes… I read.

He has a new collection.  “Trajectory”.  It is… great.  Four pieces and maybe I like them because they are a little longer than your usual short story.  All the stories involve people at “difficult” times in their lives.  Three of them are about men who are perhaps past their prime but...still alive.  Still coping.

Desperate people.  Funny people.  Broken people.  My people.

“Horsemen” tells the story of a female english professor dealing with her past, her impaired son, her caretaker husband and memories of an old laureate genius who told her her writing was perfect but, didn't have it when she was a grad student.  She experiences all in the context of discovering an entitled student plagiarizing his final paper.  So much texture here in 38 pages.

The next story, “Voice” follows a man on a group trip to Venice for Biennale.  I had never heard of Biennale before but I was reading this in europe while it was going on.

http://www.labiennale.org/en/Home.html

It is clearly too sophisticated for my understanding but serves as a nice backdrop for a tour with his brother with whom he is estranged, running from (or at least hiding from) a humiliation at his university where he is one of the leading scholars on… wait for it...Jane Austen.  Just a lost, lonely man with a problem in his family in Venice.

“Intervention” tells the story of a New England realtor trying to sell houses in a declining market and stuck with his sister's house, which is full of her life accumulations.  He has a brother too and memories of a father who was a saver and a brother who is a deal guy. Closure comes hard.

The book finishes with a beautiful little story of “Milton and Marcus”.  It is the story of an author and screenwriter who travels to Colorado to “take a meeting” on a little treatment he did years before for good friend.  The actor who wants it is all Hollywood and he is whoring himself out for health insurance for his ailing wife back home… and running out of time.  Beautiful.

The thing about Russo is he just is...evocative.  He is not the guy who wrote “Mohawk”.  His is not the kid who wrote “Ransum”.  He is a man who understands ageing and understands the pain and beauty of life and writes what he knows.  I strongly recommend this one.

Universal Harvest: John Darnielle

Soooo….John Darnielle… lead guitarist, songwriter, singer, leader of “The Mountain Goats” who also aspires as an author.  His first novel “The Wolf In The White Van” was nominated for the National Book Award and was in a lot of ways a great little book.  That is one of the nicest things I can say about an author, that they write “little” books.  There is tendency especially after the first novel to, for lack of a better term bloviate, following their success, believing (apparently) that they have so much more to share.  Kudos to Darnielle for not getting to impressed with himself.

That being said it is a difficult book.  Set primarily in Iowa.  It explores families and according to Darnielle in particular mothers. It is fitting to be banking out a review of it on Mother’s Day but it is part of Darnielle’s somewhat dark take on the world that it is difficult to view this as a “homage”.  We have mothers who have disappeared and mothers who have apparently died. Families seem to come unmoored, at best, when bereft of even a mentally ill mother.

It all kind of starts around a spooky premise of a guy working at a video store who starts to get reports that “there is something weird” on this tape.  The story is set in the 80’s primarily and it is heartening to the baby boomer in me to have such detailed discussions of VCR’s and small video rental stores which used to be a hallmark of the suburbs and small towns and he name checks a lot of movies as he sets the stage.  The “something” tends to be someone recording over a portion of the video for some vaguely described yet very disturbing “vignettes”.  Implied violence...perhaps even torture but certainly troubling images that disturb people's days, nights, sleep and for some, their lives, which is the case of the video store owner who recognizes in these tapes something familiar and goes to investigate.

For me, perhaps due to disjointed reading I found the book somewhat confusing even though well written.  He really does a good job dealing with basic family, basic dysfunction, basic dysfunctional families. Some of the relationships just seem very personal but very real.  There is not a lot of action in the book but there is a lot of, relationship...dialogue and angst...especially in the context of Iowa.  One of the big things I took from it all was that there is a lot of trouble in even the calmest, most boring and apparently sedate households.  Almost Biblical… there is always more than enough trouble to go around and that old canard that happy families are always happy in the same way and unhappy families… there are a million ways and Darnielle explores a couple.

I cant tell you to buy this and read it but it is well written and it is interesting and if I had read it sober each night it might have fit together better for me.