Change of pace

Russo follows his Pulitzer effort with his darkest work yet

By John Freeman

The Whore’s Child, and other stories By Richard Russo, Knopf; New York, 225 pages; $24.

AFTER THE FALLS: Richard Russo focuses on the short story.

It’s difficult not to flinch when picking up this new volume of short stories by Richard Russo. How unforgiving that word, “whore.” Unlike a profanity, which clubs you with its nastiness, whore brings its associations to the table indirectly. It calls to mind dingy hotel rooms and stolen hours, unfaithful husbands and the chaos they leave in their wake, all topics that Russo touches on here.

How fitting that Russo, who lives in Camden, has written a book about what goes on in the bedroom. Many of the narrators of these stories are, like the characters played by Sissy Spacek and Tom Wilkinson in that Oscar nominee of last year, flush into their 50s, dragging marriages behind them like unwanted luggage.

Although affairs are involved, Russo treats them as symptoms, rather than a causes of his characters’ marital malaise. In “Monhegan Light,” a Hollywood muckety-muck visits an island where he once vacationed with his late wife, planning to confront her lover. Regarding a painting the man did of his wife as she leaned in a doorway, the narrator grows rueful. “I’m always going to know it was you she wanted to come through that door,” he tells his rival. “Wrong,” the man replies, “I was the one who did come through that door. You were the one she was waiting for.”

Indeed, there’s a wintry aura to these stories. Russo’s characters are confronting their life decisions, hoping its not too late to change their minds. In “Poison,” a successful writer fields a visit from a much less successful contemporary, a man who, like him, grew up in upstate New York, the son of a mill worker. The narrator’s directions for taking the ferry out to his island home sound a lot like a riff on the perils both face in middle age.

“It makes you think of all the other boats you’ve missed, the other things that required reservations you didn’t know how to make, or refused to make on principle. And it’s no fun sitting there in the hot summer sun trying to gauge what cannot be gauged: how many no-shows there’ll be, how many times the boat will come and go without you to the place where you want to be.”

Although The Whore’s Child is a darker book than any Russo has written yet, it contains moments of laugh-aloud humor. Russo has a knack for letting characters damn themselves with their own words. In “The Farther You Go,” a man recently recovering from prostate surgery toils in agony on top of a vigorously vibrating riding lawn mower. When his wife asks him what’s wrong he replies:

“ ‘Nothing’ . . . It’s my standard line. Nothing is wrong. Go ahead, try to find something that’s wrong. If something were wrong, I constantly reassure her, I’d say so, always amazed at how readily this lie springs to my lips. I’ve never in my life told her when anything was wrong, and I have no intention of telling her about my throbbing groin now.”

Digression has always been the engine that fuels Russo’s comedy. In short fiction, however, he hasn’t the room to forever ply ridiculous situations into fall-down-wet-your-pants farces. Thus, he must draw on other skills — manipulation of voice, the turning of a choice phrase — to get us chuckling.

In all but one case — the fourth story, “Joy Ride” — he succeeds. As the tale begins, a mother hurriedly instructs her son to pack up his belongings; they are fleeing town and her tedious husband. “Next time you see one of these,” she tells her son, pointing at a Maine harbor as they drive away, “it’ll be on the other side of the country, a whole different ocean.” Although the mother’s use of such clichés is supposed to reflect her lack of imagination, it grates on the ears, instead.

This is a rare slip. For a writer not used to working in the short form, Russo demonstrates a terrific sense of compression. If they could, each story would close with a satisfying “thunk” like the one produced by shutting the door of a German automobile. This tidiness is all the more remarkable for the complexity of human emotion he captures within them.

Would that life were a work of fiction, open to endless revision? This wish forms the crux of the collection’s stellar title piece, in which a nun enrolls in a man’s creative writing class only to spend her time writing her life story. When a student exposes the lie she’s embedded into her “memoir,” the nun is shocked. “So,” she tells her teacher, “I was writing what you call a fictional story after all.”

The same holds true, Russo suggests, for the stories we tell of ourselves. Let’s hope they be happier ones than the ones he brings so faithfully — and painfully — to life in The Whore’s Child.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com.