Richard
Russo
Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of Empire Falls
talks with Robert Birnbaum
Posted:
Back in the Day
Copyright 2001 by Robert Birnbaum
All photos by Red Diaz/Duende Publishing
Print this interview
 Richard
Russo is the author of Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s
Fool, Straight Man and his newest novel, Empire
Falls. He has also written the introduction
to the recently published Collected Short Stories of Richard
Yates and contributed an essay to Terrell Lester’s photography
book, Maine: The Seasons. Russo has taught at The University
of Southern Illinois, The Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Colby
College. In addition to writing fiction, Russo has created numerous
screenplays, some of which have even been made into films (Nobody’s
Fool, Twilight).
Currently he is putting together a short story collection and, of
course, working on his next novel. Richard Russo lives in coastal
Maine with his family.
Robert Birnbaum: Empire
Falls is dedicated to filmmaker Robert Benton. Why?
Richard Russo: My standard line is that he
changed my life by making Nobody’s Fool and then getting
me into screenwriting and I wanted him to know that there were no
hard feelings. (both laugh)
RB: That’s very kind of you. (RR laughs)
You could have dedicated it to Paul Newman for being on the cover
of the paperback of Nobody’s Fool.
RR: That crossed my mind as well. Of course,
Benton and I have worked together on another project. We worked
on Twilight.
RB: A terrific film.
RR: Yeah well...I wasn’t a hundred percent
sold on it. Of course, I knew what was on the cutting room floor,
too. Some of my favorite stuff got cut out of that movie.
RB: Susan Sarandon, Paul Newman, Gene Hackman?
RR: And James Garner, who was so goddamned
good in that movie. He was just wonderful in that. That last scene — I
was not a complete fan of the movie — that last scene
with Garner explaining things to Newman’s character, I thought
was just terrific. Benton and I are trying to get another project
off the ground right now, based on a Scott Phillips novel called
The Ice Harvest.
RB: What happened to Straight Man?
Can you say?
RR: You remember the movie The Princess
Bride, one of my favorite movies. Do you remember the scene
after Wesley has been tortured to death on the rack of pain? The
giant and the swordsman take his body into Billy Crystal and they
say to him, "What do you think? He’s dead." And Billy
Crystal says, "I’ve seen worse." (Both laugh) That’s
what it is with Straight Man right now. It’s dead, but
I’ve seen worse. (More laughter)
RB: Something a change in regime at whatever
studio...
RR: I think it would take a change in regime
in order to get it made. It was a Dreamworks project. There was
terrific producer on it, Mark Johnson. And he and his people loved
it. I did — god knows how many drafts of it — the
final draft (or the next to the final draft) that I did, they loved.
They went out and hired a director. We made some cosmetic revisions
and took it to the studio and they said we don’t really want
to make this movie. And they made Galaxy Quest instead. Which
was probably smart, Galaxy Quest probably made more money
than this movie would have.
RB: Is it a problem to do film work and write
fiction?
RR: It’s the exact opposite of what
I imagined would happen. What I imagined and what people warned
me about — I was warned by other novelists — "Well,
if you start doing that kind of work and you like it and it’s
easy, your skills as a novelist are going to atrophy as a result
of working in an inferior art form. You’ll find that when you
come back it will be tough to do. You’ll find that after awhile
that writing movie scripts is all you are fit for." That struck
me as quite possibly true. (laughs)
RB: Maybe it was true for the people that
told you that.
RR: And maybe it was. I did three screenplays
when I was writing Empire Falls, which I think is really
some of my best work.
RB: Because it felt good to write it?
RR: It felt horrible to write it. It was
a very painful book to write. But to get back to the screenplay
thing, I would interrupt the book — usually at a
time that was good — I was at a place where I could
break and then go off for six weeks and write a screenplay — but
I would go off and do that and when I came back to the novel, it
was like I had gone someplace with a hammer and nails and built
something over there and then got back and discovered my entire
tool box. Going back to the novel, so much more was required. And
that’s part of what people were warning me about. That if you
do this other thing that is easy, it’s hard to go from an easier
task to a more complex task. Actually, if you can do both, going
back to the complex task is like breathing pure oxygen. It was a
wonderful high to come back to it and still find it there and find
the characters compelling. Which is not to say that screenwriting
is easy. A lot of them don’t even get made and others get compromised.
But, it’s...
RB: Not writing a novel...
RR: ...it’s not writing a novel.
RB: You are writing a sketch for what someone
else is going to do.
RR: I’m one craftsman involved in a
project that ultimately is not going to be mine in any real sense
at all.
RB: Is the most challenging part of screenwriting
writing dialogue? And that usually gets transformed...
RR: Yeah. One of the reasons I have gotten
into writing screenplays — one of the reasons it’s
a natural — is that dialogue is my strong suit as
a writer anyway — so making that bridge is pretty
easy.
RB: I want to get back to the painfulness
in writing this book that you mentioned, but let's talk about Richard
Yates first. What I know of Yates and what I got from your introduction
to his Collected Stories got me to thinking about a seeming
paradox of a writer appreciating a writer or being a fan of a writer,
and even when that writer does not write like the person he admires.
In this case that’s you and Richard Yates. There is no rule
that you should write like people you admire, but still Yates, like
Robert Stone, shows people in trouble who don’t get out of
trouble. Also not your way.
RR: 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. I do love the work
of a lot of people who are very different from me. I love Alice
Munro’s work. Here’s somebody who can write one end of
what turns out to be a twenty five or thirty page story in The
New Yorker, sometimes without a single scene in it, with virtually
no dialogue, in this gorgeous prose, pretty language. That in its
astonishing grace — is just about as far away from
the rhythms of the prose that I write, imaginable. Yet, when I’m
in her world, I’m in her world. And the same way with Yates.
What everybody says about Yates is that — I am such
a cautiously but definitely congenitally hopeful person. My characters
don’t so much get out of trouble as learn how to live with
it — but Yates’ characters don’t even get
that far. Yates’ characters go from bad trouble to worse trouble
and end up in heartbreak the way moths go to flames. In very few
of his stories is he ever able to achieve the kind of marginal hope
that I arrive at in just about everything I write. So it is strange
in that way.
But his work is so honest and his vision is so clear,
so clear-eyed, that when I’m reading a Richard Yates story,
I’ll go back to work on something of my own at the desk and
I’m suddenly a different person. I see the world differently,
and the story that comes out of me is not going be influenced in
that sense by Yates, but while I’m there with him, his vision
for that period of time is my vision, and it’s that way with
most really good writers. The only time I object to another writer
who sees the world differently than I see it is when, for one reason
or another, it seems to me that what that writer is saying either
isn’t true or that the writer doesn’t really believe it.
That it’s a pose or something like that. When I sense that
happening I’m gone. But somebody like Yates or somebody like
Alice Munro...
RB: Both writers who are referred to — you
alluded to this about Yates — as writers’ writers.
What happens to such writers? Does Alice Munro sell books?
RR: We can look it up right now on Amazon.com.
It’s one of the things that we can do now that we never used
to be able to do before, is find out how many books these people
sell...(laughs)
RB: No, no, no. I don’t believe that.
I don’t know that serious readers use Amazon.
RR: No, that may be true but we can also...if
we were in any end of the book business now...that’s the reason
a lot of mid-career writers are having so much trouble right now
publishing books — is that record of their sales
is now pretty much public knowledge. They deliver a new book and
somebody looks up the last three or four and crunches the numbers
and they decide that this person is not making us a lot of money.
So a writer’s writer like Alice Munro. I really don’t
know. I think of her as selling millions because she’s so good.
(laughs) How could everybody not love Alice Munro?
RB: I’m sure both of us place a high
value on people who are writers...
RR: Yeah, yeah.
RB: Well, do you think that is a prevailing
point of view in the world?
RR: Oh I think not. (laughs)
RB: How could that not be?
RR: Yeah, yeah and in much the same way,
much the same principle is in effect in the movies. Think about
Straight Man not getting made and Galaxy Quest getting
made. One of the factors that may have had something to do with
that was, that they may have looked across town and seen Wonder
Boys was a month ahead of us in terms of production. And said
to themselves, "Is there any great compelling need for two academic
satires movies coming out within the same year?" Or may have been
thinking just as logically, is there any need for one? Because in
fact Wonder Boys, wonderful movie that was, people stayed
away in droves.
RB: The soundtrack probably grossed more
money...
RR: Yeah, so you have a wonderful writer
like Yates who gets praised to the skies, who gets short-listed
and wins major awards and is out print a decade after his death.
What I’m trying to track in my mind is to what extent that
happens to certain writer’s writers or is that a rule of thumb
for writer’s writers?
RB: Probably that’s how we define them
in part because they go out of print, only writers talk about them,
their legacy isn’t about a broad readership...
RR: I’m trying to think of an exception
to that.
RB: I can’t think of another writer’s
writer at the moment.
RR: I have to say that if someone were applying
that terminology to me I would have serious misgivings. (laughs)
That certainly tells us something.
RB: How similar are Robert Stone and Richard
Yates?
RR: Interesting. I’m thinking of books
like Dog Soldiers and Outerbridge Reach. Stone’s
characters are of the same type — their sense of
their being utterly alone in the world. They are lonely. They are
terribly lonely people. But strangely enough Yates' stories are
very social. In the sense that we see the way their loneliness is
defined is in their relationships with other people. So you have
the characters in "A Really Good Jazz Piano," one of those typical
Yates symbiotic relationship, where there’s the good-looking
glib easy talking Carson who has his overweight buddy to go with
him. And when they meet girls on the beach it’s just assumed
that Carson will get the pretty one and the other guy gets the one
who is always taking second best, all of her life.
To read Yates is to read these stories of these
symbiotic relationships that are an expression of loneliness and
the you watch as these people that have so little, just this one
friend or something like that, and you see that ripped away. A lot
of the alienation in Stone’s books comes directly out of something
that’s going on in these characters’ souls. You see the
guy in Outerbridge Reach whose alienation is not going to
be dramatized by scenes with his wife. Rather he’s going to
get in the boat and go off and he’s going to be alone. And
you see that soldier in Dog Soldiers, that final trek that
he makes alone...you have this great sense of these ancient mariner
type characters whose relationship to the world is to grab somebody
by the shoulders and say, "Listen to my tale!" (laughs) It’s
a little bit different, too. Loneliness and alienation is certainly
a central theme to both.
RB: I was thinking of Stone’s short
story collection, The Bear and Other Stories. Almost all
of them were bad situations getting worse...
RR: And the great one, the one about the
alcoholic, Winter, where he keeps hearing the dogs out in
the forest. You know these are not real dogs or they are but...
RB: ...but they are not out there. Why was
Empire Falls hard for you?
 RR:
This one was particularly hard to write because my daughters were
both in high school when I started writing it. And it was, for me,
right from the start, a kind of a night sweat of a book. It’s
probably politically incorrect to say but it always seemed to me
if you have sons you are spending a lot of time worrying what they
are going to do. Will they get drunk and wreck the car? Will they
do this, will they do that? If you have daughters you are afraid
of what will be done to them. A lot of this book concentrates a
lot of my fears as a father of daughters. Tick, who is my favorite
character in the book, was formed in part because my younger daughter,
Kate — when I was writing this and I knew that sections
of it were going to take place in high school and all of that — she
was really good. She would, every night at dinner, tell me what
had gone on at high school. Not the kind of stories you necessarily
tell your dad. Both of my daughters really, but Kate in particular,
got mixed up in both the creative process and in my own head with
the character of Tick that I knew I was going to have to take to
a nightmare place. That’s why it was so hard to do.
RB: You acknowledged their contribution and
go on to say how horrible high school can be and that life couldn’t
get worse.
RR: I think that for those for whom it was
bad there probably is nothing quite as bad. They are never going
to feel...kids that age haven’t completely built up their defenses
against life’s pain. They are more vulnerable and hurt more
deeply and the wounds take so much longer to heal, if they ever
heal. When violence erupts in schools or in people’s towns,
people ask themselves, "How could such a thing happen in our community?
What are the causes of such things?" I just want to say just go
rent a movie called Welcome to The Dollhouse and watch and
you’ll neverask that question again. It has in it everything
you need to know about why such things happen.
RB: There is a conventional wisdom that is
often touted that children are ‘resilient’? What is the
evidence for that?
RR: The fact that we are still around at
age sixty or whatever, I guess. Actually, kids are pretty resilient
but they are so fragile. As they get older you realize that whatever
it is that they are crying about is the tip of an iceberg that you
are never gonna know, you’re never gonna understand. This is
what they are able to put into words to you, but the real wound
is somewhere deeper and something that in some cases you would really
like to get at, that’s Miles’ [protagonist of Empire
Falls] situation in this book. He’s got a kid that’s
telling him that everything is okay. Everything is not okay. But
there is no way for him to get there.
RB: In terms of viewing our ‘resilience’
as we get older, I believe that we are as frail as children...
RR: Resilience in the sense that it doesn’t
completely kill us. We’re still ambulatory, we’re still
putting up a good front. And we fool most of the people most of
the time. That’s a kind of limited resilience isn’t it
(bursts out laughing)...
RB: Inertia, entropy? You are basically a
Northeasterner but have lived in southern Illinois...
RR: I was in Arizona for all of my education,
between ’67 and ’79. And then lived in Pennsylvania and
Connecticut and then in southern Illinois. And then up to Maine.
RB: I was thinking fictionally...
RR: Yeah, my fictional journey has been from
New York, a couple of different places and then down to central
Pennsylvania and then up to Maine.
RB: Central Pennsylvania was the setting
for Straight Man.
RR: Yeah.
RB: You’ve been living in Maine for
the last ten years and teaching at Colby College until four years
ago when you were liberated.
RR: When Paul Newman liberated me.
RB: Would the way you have populated your
fiction been different had you continued to live in Illinois or
Arizona? Does the Northeast provide you with something?
RR: I think that living in the Northeast
is just better for me personally. I just like it better. I feel
like understand my world better when I’m here. But interestingly...the
logical extension of being close to something as we write about
it would be...for instance, when I was writing those upstate New
York books, I was not living there. But visiting, going back and
spending some time in my hometown. If you think about it in those
terms, should have been helpful. Actually, it’s not. I find
that going back visiting — and I do from time to
time because I have relatives there and loved ones — so
I do go back. I find that those visits don’t give me anything
that I can use fictionally. More than any thing else they tend to
irritate some authorial membrane because I’ve told so many
lies about these places now that when I go back the places themselves
that the towns are based on don’t conform. (laughs) I find
myself irritated by the fact that somehow these lies that I have
told about them haven’t manifested themselves in some physical
reality.
RB: Why do you call them lies?
RR: Well, they’re truths of a sort,
I suppose but I’m just changing things.
RB: They are fictions.
RR: All right...(both laugh) lies.
RB: Are you just agreeing with me to be agreeable?
Is it really the case that people in Maine call people from Massachusetts
"massholes"? I’ve never heard that before. Of course, I haven’t
been to Maine much.
RR: Well, come on up you’ll hear it...if
you keep your ears open. Yeah, you will hear that from time to time.
RB: Any other cute names for people from
New Hampshire or New York?
RR: I think it’s pretty much Massachusetts.
RB: So even if you are from New York City
or whatever if they don’t like you you are a masshole?
RR: (both laugh) It maybe...
RR: In the upper Michigan peninsula you’ll see signs,
"FIBS go home." A FIB is Fucking Illinois Bastard. There’s
something in Wisconsin...
RB: This is in the great American tradition
of biting the hand that feeds you.
RR: Exactly. You see it in Maine, of course,
the farther inland you get is where you see this resentment...
RB: Because the economy is in greater disarray?
RR: Money from Massachusetts and elsewhere
has stuck closer to the coast. I know at Colby where I used to teach...along
the coast of Maine, where live in Camden there is MBNA a credit
card company that has come in and in towns all up and down the coast,
Rockland, Belfast, they’ve gone in and created lots of jobs
and revitalized some of those coastal towns. There is a good deal
of resentment against them, too. Because they come in and theyare
throwing money around and changing the town.
RB: The Wal-mart phenomenon?
RR: Well, except that this is well up market
of Wal-mart. You go inland about thirty miles and you have the same
sort of towns that need the same sort of rescuing...when the former
president of Colby College was trying to get the fellow who was
doing all this MBNA work along the coast to take a similar interest
in Waterville — a nice little college town, a former
mill town — but people aren’t interested. When
investment comes up to Maine it sticks right along the coast or
Sugarloaf. So there is a kind of built up resentment of this money
once you get twenty miles inland because: numberone, it exists and
it never seems to stray very far from the water.
RB: You see the same thing in the Caribbean,
especially in the British Caribbean...I remember Jamaica Kincaid...
RR: Oh yeah, her book A Small Island
just eviscerates that whole colonialism...that’s what it is,
too. That’s why it’s massholes, because Maine is a colony.
(laughs) It’s a god damned colony of Massachusetts and it was
part of Massachusetts!
RB: When I talked to writer Van Reid [a life-long
Mainer] I was surprised to learn how progressive Maine had been
and how vital and vibrant it had been and now it’s a vacation
home for the wealthy. This is, of course, a biggerproblem. Around
the country you have small towns dependant on one industry or business.
What happens to the people when they leave or go out of business?
You get an Empire Falls...
RR: Empire Falls is what happens. Mohawk
is what happens. It’s funny, too, because if you talk to somebody
as I have been — I’ve been on the West Coast
before coming back here — I was talking to another
interviewer the other day who was saying, "I understand what
these books are about and I visit back there and I see it but it’s
really foreign to somebody from California." Or pretty much
anywhere in the West because what’s happening to small towns
in California is that they’re just growing by leaps andbounds.
In the not too distant future every place in California is going
to be a bedroom community of Los Angeles or San Francisco. All these
little towns are just becoming part of a larger organism and when
you are on the West Coast, really from Phoenix or Vegas westward,
all the way to the coast, you see this phenomenon of the organism
just multiplying out of control like something in a sci-fi movie.
Then you get to the Rust Belt in New England and you see where all
those people are coming from.
RB: Will a map of population distribution
of the USA in 2050 show everyone living in California, Florida,
or Arizona?
RR: The thing that’s so tragic for a
lot of these people is that change istaking place even in places
like Empire Falls. At the end of this book the church has been converted
to condominiums, a brew pub in the old mill and you do have a credit
card company or something that’s come in a taken over part
of the town. And other things, in Empire Falls I’m sure there
will be a Gap, and there will be a Starbucks. There will be all
of those things and the problem is that for these particular people,
having spent their lives in one way, most of them are not going
to have the skills to do what the new economy of Empire Falls is
going to call for.
RB: Are they going to have the money?
RR: And they are not going to be able to
afford to live in their own houses.The problem in the beginning
of the book, in Empire Falls, is that nobody can sell a house because
nobody wants to live there. Right? And there are too many houses
on the market. But once the brew pub gets up and going and once
a certain number of people are employed doing phone solicitation,
once the Starbucks opens up, those same houses that you couldn’t
sell at any price are going to be unaffordable to the kinds of people
that have lived their lives in the shirt factory or textile mill.
RB: You read stories about Provincetown,
Martha’s Vineyard, The Hamptons, where working people can’t
afford to live.
RR: It’s the same way with lobstermen
along the coast of Maine. The people who need to be on the water
have to move farther and farther inland because property taxes make
it virtually impossible for them to live. There’s one peninsula
not far from where we live in Camden — the St George’s
peninsula, where Tenant’s Harbor is — and there
are still a lot of lobster fishermen (you know Maine is all peninsulas,
jutting out into the Atlantic) a lot of the peninsulas are absolutely
unaffordable except to the very rich. This one peninsula will be
that way before long. For now, there are still a lot of the real
Maine lobstermen who have been doing this work for many generations.
You wonder how much longer it will be before these people who make
their living at the sea won’t be able to afford to live on
ornear the sea.
RB: Is Maine your home for the rest of your
life?
RR: I’m not sure — I
love it there. One of the things I love about Maine is that it seems
to be so far outside the culture. I don’t whether it’s
because we are a little bit behind up there or whatever. Popular
culture, whether it’s in the form of music or TV videos or
the obsession with celebrity or whatever it is that infects the
larger organism, doesn’t seem to be as deeply rooted in Maine.
In Maine there is still very much a community affect — people
care about their neighbors, for the most part. People who lock their
houses, in most of Maine, do so only because they watch television.
Either that or they have lived someplace else. If they’ve lived
someplace else they are still doing it out of habit. If they have
lived all their lives in Maine, they nevertheless being watching
television and know from the television what a violent horrible
world it is. For that reason they are locking their doors, but there
is no real reason to. People look after each other. A few years
ago we had that horrible ice storm up there, I was never gladder
to live in Maine than during that horrible storm because you would
just walk outside and people who had the worst problems — your
neighbors were all over there helping. When our street got power
back we were scavenging in the neighborhoods for power cords so
that we could run cords out of our house up over the fence into
the next street so that people could have enough power on the next
street to at least take showers. Maine is still a lot like that.
People are courteous to each other, they care about each other.
The kind of epic incivility that seems to be running rampant in
a lot of the country now...life is slower, people don’t get
as annoyed with each other.
RB: In the essay you wrote for Terrell Lester’s
photo book, Maine: The Seasons you talked about worry and
competence...
RR: "Worry is not competence, but we make
do with the former since the latter may reside only in our imaginations — or
in summer, when it’s really not needed." In fall you worry
about the winter and you do the kinds of things that help you believe
that perhaps you are a competent man.
RB: You never quite get all the wood or cover
all the contingencies...
RR: Or what you have is probably not what
will be called for this particular winter.
RB: How did your contribution of an essay
to that book come about?
RR: I did not know the photographer. I was
sent some photographs by Paul Bogardz from Knopf. He contacted me,
asking if I would be willing to do it. I said that I really shouldn’t
because I’ve only been living there for ten years and as far
as everybody in Maine is concerned I’m from away. You should
look for somebody else.
RB: Richard
Ford? Ann Beattie?
RR: That’s it, I asked who was writing
the other essays? Bogey said, "Richard Ford, Anne Beattie and Elizabeth
Strout." And I said, "Hell, I’m as much a Mainer as they are."
He asked me if I had any ideas and once I got thinking about my
grandfather we were off to the races.
RB: Let’s talk about Empire Falls.
Were you tempted to make the prologue of the book where you give
the family history of the Whitings, the family that has controlled
area around Empire Falls, longer? Did you say everything you wanted
to say about them?
RR: Yeah, pretty much. That came late, the
beginning of the book for most of the first draft was the first
chapter. When it finally became clear to me just how large the canvas
was going to be — the first back story scene in the
novel was the trip Miles and his mother make to Martha’s Vineyard — and
then I realized I left them in a place that I couldn’t really
leave them. I had to take them farther up than that. Then it suddenly
dawned on me, "You know, this is a significant portion of the
book, we have to find a structural device for it, we’ll put
it all in italics. We’ll just expand that story and break it
up to place in various parts of the novel." Of all the back story
parts that are in italics, that CB Whiting and the moose one was
one of the later ones. Though it’s the first thing in the book,
it’s not the first thing...
RB: I thought the story of the trip Miles
and his mother make to Martha’s Vineyard could stand alone.
RR: That’s possible, it is rather self-contained.
RB: When you do readings from Empire Falls
what do you read?
RR: I have four or five sections of the book
that I read. I generally choose what I’m going to read that
night according the kind of time frame, wherever I am, whatever
they want. I’ll just say, "How long a reading are you
thinking about?" I have a couple in each length so that I’m
just not doing the same thing every night.
RB: Do you have any sense of who your audience
is?
RR: The nice thing is that with each book
there are more of them. Whoever the hell they are, there are more
of them.
RB: Your new book has a large printing.
RR: So there’s that! I remember my first
book tour very well. I remember reading in Chicago at Barbara’s
Bookstore, it may have been my first stop, to the staff of the store.
RB: They probably treasure that moment now...
RR: Yes, (laughs) if they remember it and
I’m sure they do...but there are more of them now. I am always
a little bit surprised at the demographic of my readers. I had assumed,
very naively of course, when I first started writing, that the people
I was writing about and to my own way of thinking the people I was
writing for, would be the people who would be reading my novels.
It turns out nothing could be further from the truth. I thought
that they might be small town people because I was writing about
small towns. I thought that they might be working people because
I was writing about working people. A lot of my characters don’t
have an awful lot of education. It turns out my reading public has
always been densely city, very much higher level of education than
I would have imagined and most of them are not working people at
all. They’re in education, the professions...looking back at
it now I’m not sure why that surprised me so much. But I was
very naive about it, in thinking that the people I was writing about
would appreciate it. Whereas I’ve come to realize, of course,
that people who live the kind of lives that I write about want escape
from those lives. They don’t want to dwell imaginatively in
the lives that they are living. They want their books to be set
on Capri. And why the hell not! I think my readers are pretty much
the same as they’ve been all along. Just more of them.
RB: Are you tempted to do what William Kennedy
or William Faulkner have done, which is to create and populate a
fictional locale that you continue to write about?
RR: Interesting question. I remember when
I had written The Risk Pool, I had in mind after that, two
books. One of which was the book that became Nobody’s Fool.
The other was the book that became Straight Man. I had written
fifty pages of one and seventy five pages of the other. And I sent
them to my agent. Of the Nobody’s Fool book I said,
"I have some misgivings about this. Having written two novels
set in upstate New York, now I have another upstate New York novel.
Another small town novel. Sully has a fair amount in common with
Sam Hall. Are people going to think I’m in some sort of rut
here, that I’m coming up against the borders of my imagination
and talent and all of that?" My agent said, "No, this is the
book, the Nobody’s Fool book, that you should write
first. If you are developing a style, people will want to recognize
a Richard Russo novel in the same way that you feel comforted by
picking up any Dickens novel and knowing that you are in the world
of Dickens. Broadening your territory and setting your books in
different places, you can do that if you want but you have to remember
that you are working on a career in which certain things are going
to be recognizably yours. Your world, your style and you shouldn’t
worry too much about that." Your question is kind of the reverse
of that. You are saying, "What if, by branching out — this
book is in Maine, the other was in Pennsylvania...what Kennedy does
and what Faulkner did was to go well beyond the historical thing
that I’ve done in this book by creating a historical context
for the story to take place in. That makes it a much less personal
book than The Risk Pool, for instance. What Kennedy does
is not to create history so much as myth. He is creating a whole
mythos. What I’m doing and what people have noticed about this
book, they’ve said "All right, yeah, it’s set in Maine
but only because you call it Maine. This town isn’t really
so different than your upstate New York town. Are you in essence
writing upstate New York books?" My response is, "To the extent
that I was ever writing upstate New York books." Really, what I
am writing about in all of these is, class and work. If Empire
Falls has a lot in common with Mohawk and Bath and even strangely
enough Railton [PA] Straight Man is a real departure in its
tone and everything else and it’s in Pennsylvania, but Railton
is another Russo town.
RB: This is quite minor, but you frequently
note the makes of cars in parking lots to signal something about
class: the Vineyard Haven chapel with its parking lot full of Mercedes
and Lexus showing that people inside truly believe that god is in
proper place in heaven...
RR: That’s right. Should I stop? (laughs)
When I was teaching I would always tell students...they would want
to write these stories, these novels and give me these very skeletal
type things. I would say, "Go back, go back. See what’s
there. See what’s there as clearly as you possibly can."
They’d say, "No, I’ll go back and fill that in later."
I would always say. "It’s not a matter of filling it in. What
you see is not just an object, the objects in your fiction have
to take you beyond that in to some sort of other realm... in the
realm of pure meaning. You can’t go back and fill it in later.
It’s a door that you have to open and walk through. The physicality
of the world is a door that you will open and you walk through it
and if you are not seeing it you are not going to get there. There
is just no way to get there without seeing these things. Right from
The Risk Pool, one of the ways we trace Sam Hall in that
novel, is through his car. He starts out driving a great big gas
guzzling old car. By the end, of the novel he’s driving a tiny
little Subaru, the headlights of which don’t work. That’s
not my interest in cars there.
RB: Russell Banks' recent novels have been
set in the Northeast...
RR: We occupy a lot of the same geographic
territory.
RB: But your points of view are quite different.
RR: Not a lot of laughs in Russell Banks’
books. He’s another writer, when I read him his vision seems
as every bit as true as mine. I read through his eyes about a place
that I know and would see entirely differently left to my own devices.
But when I’m reading him I am not left to my own devices...
RB: Reading other fiction doesn’t impede
your own writing. You can do movie work. You must be a well-adjusted
person who knows what he can do.
RR: Oh Jesus, I wouldn’t go that far.
I kind of know what I know. And I kind of know what I can do. I’d
like to think that I don’t take myself so seriously that if
I fail at something its going to...so what? I suppose adjusted in
the sense of as Dirty Harry says, "A man’s gotta know his limitations."
(laughs)
RB: You’re laughing, but it would seem
to me lots of problems arise from people who don’t know what
they don’t know.
RR: Yeah, and we recognize that in other
people. All the time, "If there were any way to be honest with
this person I would tell him exactly what his problem is."
And, of course, you can’t.
All fotos by Red Diaz / Duende Publishing.
Robert Birnbaum came to journalism, where
he has been a practitioner for the past two decades, from a series
of possibly (it's too soon to tell) educational vocational experiences
that are too numerous to mention. In the '80s and '90s, as publisher/creative
director of STUFF magazine in Boston, when he wasn't attending industrial
gatherings, he interviewed nearly 500 hundred writers — from
Martin Amis and Isabel Allende to Marianne Wiggins and Howard Zinn
— and read almost 1000 books. He is currently, among other
things, pondering if there is a place for him in a profession increasingly
infested with vulgarians who believe 'editorial content' is celebrating
restaurant and shop openings, endlessly lionizing the same small
group of celebrities and reiterating the press releases of the publicists
they have just had lunch with. He lives with his Labrador retriever
Rosie and helps parent his young son Cuba Maxwell.
Note:
Featured author in November 2000
E-mail: reddiaz@aol.com
Writing interests: Interviews, Photography
Author interviews: Dorothy
Allison, Nicholson
Baker, Julian
Barnes, Andrea
Barrett, Alex
Beam, Jill
Bialosky, Amy
Bloom, Amy
Bloom 2002, Alain
de Botton, Arthur Bradford,
Ethan Canin, Stephen
Carter, Sandra
Cisneros, Michael
Connelly, Richard
Conniff, Frank
Conroy, Mark
Costello, Elizabeth
Cox, Jim Crace, Nicholas
Dawidoff, Andre
Dubus III, John
Dufresne, Tony Earley,
Barbara Ehrenreich, Gretel
Ehrlich, James
Ellroy, Richard
Ford, Alan
Furst, Alan
Furst 2002, Anthony
Giardina, James
Gleick, Adam
Gopnik, Allan Gurganus,
Barbara
Haber, David
Hadju, Ethan
Hawke, Christopher Hitchens
#1, Christopher
Hitchens #2, Gabe
Hudson, Elizabeth
Inness-Brown, Ben Katchor,
Nora
Okja Keller, Chip Kidd,
Anthony
Lane, Annette
Lemieux, Alan
Lightman, Paul Lussier,
Ruben Martinez, Daniel
Mason, Thomas
McGuane, Thisbe Nissen,
Tim
O'Brien, Susan
Orlean, Ann
Packer, Arthur
Phillips, Samantha
Power, Christopher
Rice, David
Rieff, Hazel
Rowley, Richard Russo #1,
Richard
Russo #2, John
Sedgwick, David
Shields, Ilan
Stavans, Darin
Strauss, Manil
Suri, Nick
Tosches, Brady
Udall, Sarah
Vowell, Brad
Watson, W.D. Wetherell,
Mark
Winegardner, Howard
Zinn
Author portraits: John
Sayles, Howard
Zinn, Robert
Stone, Ana
Castillo, John
Waters, Allen
Ginsberg, Carl
Hiaasen, Carlos
Fuentes, Barbara
Ehrenreich, Eduardo
Galeano, Isabel
Allende, Junot
Diaz, Joan
Didion, James
Ellroy, John
Edgar Wideman, Martin
Amis, Michael
Ondaatje, Richard
Price, Rigoberta
Menchu, Louis
de Bernieres, Studs
Terkel
Photography: "I
am the Son of my Son"
Journal: "A
Reader's Progress"
Link: Review
of Cuba: A Traveler's Literary Companion at Hyde Park Review
of Books |
