Whore’s Child and Other Stories
By Richard Russo
Vintage Books, 2003
Reviewed by Tina Cohen
This first collection of short stories by novelist Richard Russo (2002 Pulitzer Prize winner for Empire Falls), appeared last year and will be released in paperback this July.
Russo currently lives in Camden. The stories focus on folks sharing common ground with the author – college teachers, writers, husbands, fathers, middle-aged men. While the collection may not be intended to illustrate one dominant theme, it seems there is one. Call it “necessary lies.”
The characters seem to be stuck living with lies of their own invention – lies they can ignore, lies they can defend – that are necessary to how they live and who they are. The author introduces us to this concept nicely in the first story, “The Whore’s Child,” where a nun in a fiction-writing workshop shares her actual life story, seemingly fictive to her classmates. In critiquing it, they stumble across the “lie” considered necessary and good in creating fiction, but in actuality a difficult truth about the sister’s life she had refused to face. Another story showing the value self-deception plays is “Joy Ride,” where a woman rewrites her past, including an attempt to escape an unhappy marriage, deciding the only problem had been an adolescent son with attitude who needed straightening out. In “Buoyancy,” Russo gives us an elderly couple on vacation, the husband a stuffy, retired professor, preoccupied with worries about his wife, who was once hospitalized for a psychotic episode. He is also author of a book about Emily Dickinson, credited with providing “the deepest secrets of one of literature’s most private lives.” The irony is that the professor hardly knows his own wife for who she really is and is ignorant about his limited perception. (We are left to wonder at how much he possibly could have understood of the elusive Dickinson.) He has based his life, both in scholarship and marriage, on lies of insight he claims for himself. Is Russo suggesting that lies are necessary to get us through life’s barrage of external pressures, expectations and hard choices? As the opening story’s workshop teacher pointed out, “This is a storytelling class, Sister. We’re all liars here. The whole purpose of our enterprise is to become skilled in making things up, of substituting our own truth for the truth. We actually prefer a well-told lie.”
Some well-drawn characters in these seven stories are memorable and their situations believable, even if jazzed up. We get some darkly humorous, paradoxical images like the bastard nun, the pale and wrinkled elderly couple sunbathing at Gay Head’s nude beach while the younger beautiful bodies are covered in thick mud and appear pale and wrinkled, and the runaway mother dressed revealingly but stickered in band-aids. Occasionally, Russo seems unsure that readers will “get it,” and a few stories go too long or have endings with heavy-handed conclusions.
In the story “Monhegan Light,” a widower goes there to confront the island artist who for many years was his now-deceased wife’s lover. The portraits he painted reveal his feelings. The husband, a gaffer who does lighting for films, is also an artist of sorts, enhancing the appearance of actors to make them look better than they do in real life. Russo seems to be showing us what art is capable of: emotion brought to a subject, as well as technical flair, can both intensify what is real and create an altered reality. We end up, as in this collection of stories, with subjective truth and the well-told lie. t
– Tina Cohen is a writer and high school librarian.