When you enjoy novels so much more than the short form, as I do, and you find a collection that draws you in, makes you wonder, helps you lose track of time.... well that is a five star book.
Russo is one of the most adept (if not THE most) American fiction authors at helping his reader feel like a character in the story. His is a gift of defining the small moment. He does so by telling of the things that go through your mind when you are undergoing a watershed event in your life. It's the type of event that becomes a watershed when you finally examine it in retrospect.
For the most part, his heroes in the collection are observers. It's a little tough to see what will tie the stories together. At first they seem not to fit. When you look at the stories as though you were there, but felt more like an observer than a participant, you see why he has chosen to build this collection of events as told by observers (or maybe it's just momentum after the Pulitzer -- I think and hope not!)
"The Whore's Child", the lead story, tells an irrational, but all too viable tale of the fate of a child at the hands of the Catholic Church. The story may have been included for the shock value of its name; yet, the writing is solid, the characters believable, and the story is one that needed to be told. It is my least favorite story in the book.
The remaining stories improve almost sequentially, with a highlight being the terrible confusion and frustration in mind of a child who is suddenly taken from one parent by another ("The Joy Ride"). The best is saved for last, in the tale of "The Mysteries of Linwood Hart"; here a young man contemplates his parents' divorce from a position of naiveté. The observations he makes and any parent who has feared the same withdrawal and reactions of their own child to a divorce best reads the conclusions he draws. Linwood, or Lin, however, is an uncommon child, whose mysteries evolve far beyond the relationship with his parents.
When Russo writes as or of a child, he thinks like a child. When his point of view is an aging, world-weary man or a youngish professor - he becomes them to explain the world, as he knows it. His writing goes far beyond assembling the words on a page! He seems to play out the story in his mind, simultaneously sharing it with his readers.
Russo is a gem in today's big author sand pile. Let's hope he goes back to novels next! As for "The Whore's Child", buy it, read it, enjoy it!,
When you enjoy novels so much more than the short form, as I do, and you find a collection that draws you in, makes you wonder, helps you lose track of time.... well that is a five star book.