Book Review: New essays from writer Richard Russo on how his life informs his art

Richard Russo, whose “Fool” trilogy is beloved for the characters he created to populate a fictional upstate New York town, freely admits he’s always pulled from his real life to write his novels. “I was born in exactly the right place at exactly the right time,” he writes in one of 12 essays that make up his slim new volume “Life and Art.”

Russo scholars — there must be some in American literature departments somewhere, right? — will devour this book. Russo writes lovingly of both his father and mother, draws explicit connections between his characters and people from his real life, takes a road trip back to his hometown Gloversville, and even throws in an homage to the late Paul Newman, whose portrayal of Sully in his “Nobody’s Fool” helped Russo’s work find an audience well beyond readers.

The 12 essays here are divided into the two parts noted in the title. “Life” is more memoir, with Russo sharing what he did during the COVID-19 pandemic, among many other things. “I’d been waiting for more than a decade… for somebody to tell me to go home and stay there, and somebody finally had.” The first half is stuffed with stories about his mother and father, anchored by “Marriage Story,” which reveals the illnesses they both suffered (gambling and alcoholism for Dad, anxiety for Mom) and how the dream life his mother envisioned after her husband survived World War II never materialized (“She and my father stalled.”). But Russo doesn’t write to assign blame. At age 75 and with both parents buried, he takes a more thoughtful approach in these essays. Not yet a teenager when Dad left, he realizes now that Mom was just doing what he does for a living as a storyteller — controlling the narrative.

Aspiring writers should appreciate the advice Russo doles out in these pages. He credits his childhood and the people who loved him as his “greatest strength” — “Like Faulkner, I’d been gifted the perfect lens through which to view America” — and tells would-be authors, “No matter how gifted you are, or how hardworking, you’re never going to be any good until you know who and what you love, because until then you won’t know who you are.”

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The second half of the collection — “Art” — is a more acquired taste, with an essay about writing movies and TV shows vs. books, as well as a rather odd one that finds life lessons in the 1969 film “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. There’s another that heaps praise on the specific word choices contained in the lyrics to the 1972 Townes Van Zandt song “Pancho and Lefty,” and another that finds echoes of society’s reaction to George Floyd’s murder in a scene from “The Maltese Falcon.” Considered all together, readers can judge if the essays, like the collection’s title, truly inform each other, or if it’s enough to simply enjoy these snippets before Russo graces the world with another novel.

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