Empire Falls (2001)

Richard Russo's big fat Pulitzer winner has any number of things going for it. It is utterly engaging, it is often very funny, and the last image is crystalline, if slightly overwrought, a perfect note of olde New England gothic. It is contemporary, but grounded. And it builds to an insane momentum that kept me anyway up way past my bedtime one night in a fever to finish it. I liked his earlier Straight Man nearly as much, maybe more, and recommend them both with little hesitation. The hesitation is a matter of something not so easily identified. I shouldn't be complaining when a novelist does his job so well, but for all its complexity it all resolves rather neatly. Not every last thread here is tied up, but those that aren't (e.g., whither Miles?) feel calculatedly ambiguous, tidy setups for reading groups (and/or American lit courses if things go well). The artfulness sometimes feel too artful, the angst almost pro forma, and the bonhomie forced. But now I'm churlish, complaining because it's too good. It's true that there are perhaps overly generous portions of feel-good moments. But the countervailing forces are often so strong that I was relieved to be able to remind myself that Russo is a writer of comedies of manners. If some things are going to sting, nothing's going to be traumatic. It's almost perfect on the slow dissolution of the mid-20th-century American postwar economy, the way all those small towns collapsed under the weight of their own naïve optimism (as we often view it now), as captains of industry pulled the rug out from under them by degrees. That is clearly the novel's great strength, and accounts for much of how it came to win all its various prizes. (That and the fact that it's olde New England, which is a topic for another time.) The characters are richly imagined and the complexities of the plot unfold with barely a misstep. Virtually every new chapter grabs hold hard and propels the momentum further, which is exactly how you go about keeping somebody up overnight. If it seems vaguely overwrought in its totality, as with that final image, it's still hard to complain that it doesn't get just about everything just right.

In case it's not at the library.

Straight Man (1997)

At first glance, Richard Russo's fourth novel (and the only one by him I know) promises to be all too familiar stuff. Our narrator William Henry Devereaux Jr. is an English prof at a state university in Pennsylvania. He is an interim chairman for the department, which is plunged into a budgetary crisis, and he himself is currently plunged into your basic mid-life crisis. Yes, all elements of one variety of today's most hackneyed literary fiction would seem to be in place: Academia, check. Middle-aged white male, check. Hysterically unraveling life, check. Sexual peccadilloes, imagined and otherwise, involving faculty, faculty spouses, and students alike, check check check. It's practically textbook. It goes deep into the weeds of college departmental politics, which even in my time as an undergrad I quickly sussed out as tedious, toxic, and the kind of thing to run away from as fast as you can. Our narrator comes with various health issues, and a complicated relationship with his father. It even gets into anxieties about real estate values. Yet for all that I found this novel to be compulsively readable, thoroughly entertaining, and a great read. For one thing, and it's the important thing, Russo would actually appear to be one of that rare breed of novelists who not only spins a good yarn but knows as well how to be funny, with wit and slapstick both (the title refers to the guy who never seems to get it in a comedy act rather than any kind of sexual orientation), desperately and effectively doing whatever it takes to get his laughs. That's a quality I can appreciate when it works, and here it does work, affording that most unusual of all reading experiences, the opportunity to actually laugh out loud. And as clichéd as its setting and various trappings may be, Russo evokes it all vividly and with any number of unexpected developments. It may be desperate in its headlong momentum but it's never sullen, nor self-pitying for even a moment, and it always seems to be perfectly and refreshingly aware of its own absurdity. Russo shows an ability to work with materials that have been previously abused and make you feel like he's got his arm around your shoulder, saying, "Stop me if you've heard this before but you're never going to believe this." And once in, you don't want to stop him. May as well read on to the end. This crazy circus is forged and resolved with a good deal of satisfying and often surprising zest.

In case it's not at the library.