Richard Russo was asked recently, for a magazine piece, to name a book that helped shape his life.
Recalling the query while sitting in the front room of his 1817 brick home on the fringe of downtown Portland, he stopped short. âLet me show you,â he blurted out and then rose from the couch to speed into another room. He returned cradling âA Childâs Garden of Versesâ by Robert Louis Stevenson, which he first read while growing up in Gloversville, New York.
Russo quickly thumbed the pages to a short poem called âForeign Lands,â about a child climbing a tree to gaze upon the mysterious world beyond his own garden wall.
âItâs all about a childâs sense of wonder, itâs that emphasis on the wonders of the world that open up through stories,â said Russo, 66. âIâve often thought about whether I would have been a writer without the Gloversville library. Hard to say, but I think not. I was like that little kid (in the poem), and the library was the tree I could climb up into to get a glimpse of the outside world.â
Russo has built his successful 30-year career and literary reputation largely writing about the kinds of people, places and shared values he saw growing up in Gloversville, a formerly bustling leather factory town. His latest novel, âEverybodyâs Fool,â is due out in May and itâs the seventh novel heâs set in a town modeled on Gloversville.
The book is a sequel to his 1993 novel âNobodyâs Fool,â about a likable, 60-year-old handyman named Donald âSullyâ Sullivan, living payday to payday and dealing with family, friends and life in a dying mill town. The sequel shows Sully at 70, but the focus is more on a minor character from âNobodyâs Fool,â insecure policeman Doug Raymer, who has risen to chief of police. âNobodyâs Foolâ was made into a 1994 film starring Paul Newman as Sully.
Russoâs 2002 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel âEmpire Falls,â though set in Maine, takes place in a version of Russoâs forlorn hometown. He says he mostly set it in Maine because he wanted a character to be able to work for wealthy summer folks along the coast. That book was also made into a film, for HBO, starring Newman again, with Ed Harris and Joanne Woodward.
Though heâs been in Maine for more than 25 years, and he and his wife raised their two daughters here, Russo continues to write about his hometown.
âThereâs nothing I can do about the fact that my imagination is most fertile in that particular ground,â Russo said. âI havenât gotten to the bottom of it yet. Thereâs still stuff there thatâs completely intriguing to me. I feel about it the way I suspect (William) Faulkner did about his fictional county in Mississippi, or the way (James) Joyce did about Dublin.â
GOING ELSEWHERE
Russo was raised by his mother, his grandparents, with other family members living on streets nearby. He credits the library, the schools and the strong sense of community there with helping shape his view of whatâs important.
Following well-planted hints from his mother to get out and see the world so she could tag along, Russo went to the University of Arizona. His mother didnât have a job lined up in Arizona and didnât drive, yet she was determined to go with her college-bound son.
In his 2012 memoir, âElsewhere,â Russo writes about his motherâs longing to get out of Gloversville and her mood swings and often-odd behaviors. He cared for his mother until her death in 2007 but didnât realize she was likely suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder. It wasnât until his own adult daughter, Kate, was diagnosed with the condition that Russo started to truly understand his mother had it too.
In the memoir, he writes about coming to the realization and feeling âhorribleâ guilt about his motherâs struggles. After reading about the disorder, he also sees some symptoms in his own behavior. Just as his mother couldnât stop fidgeting with a coaster or the drapes after someone had re-arranged them, he canât stop re-writing a sentence that anyone else would call âgood enough.â
âI was just lucky my obsession has not been destructive,â Russo said. âItâs not easy in this world to find an obsession that wonât kill you.â
After getting his doctorate in English and American Literature from the University of Arizona he taught at several colleges, including Southern Illinois University and Colby College in Waterville, before being able to quit in the mid-1990s and write full time.
Russo said he never considered being a writer until near the end of his doctoral work, when he noticed how much more fun the creative writing people in the English department seem to have compared to the lit folks. He wanted to have the same passion for his work that they had.
So he started writing. He made an attempt at a novel and submitted it to a university teacher, writer Robert C.S. Downs. Downs told Russo the work was essentially âinert.â
âHe said âyouâre setting it in a place you have a touristâs knowledge of and nothing is coming to life, with the exception of these 40 pages of back story that takes place in this mill town in upstate New York. You had me there,'â Russo said, breaking into his loud, fast-paced laugh.
A RESPECT FOR COMMUNITIES, IN FICTION AND FACT
After giving up his teaching job at Colby to write, Russo said he and his wife chose to stay in Maine in part because âMaineâs culture of hard work and unpretentiousness suited me.â Russo lived in Camden for a dozen years before moving to Portland about three years ago. Their daughtersâ families, including grandchildren, live nearby.
Russo and his wife, Barbara, live downtown because they like walking places, including bookstores and restaurants, and they like the sense of community. For years in Camden, Russo famously did a lot of his writing in coffee shops. He does that less now. He says he can tolerate lots of folks chatting over coffee, but a person having a cell phone conversation can break his concentration completely.
When Russo is not writing about gritty communities, and the vanishing middle classes that once thrived there, heâs often working to preserve the writing community, as he sees it.
He joined the Authors Guild a few years ago because he was concerned that online giants like Amazon and Google were devastating the livelihood of authors by underselling traditional bookstores and offering the written word online for free, often without paying authors.
The Authors Guild had been waging a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google for several years when Russo decided to join, and he is now the groupâs vice president. The guildâs argument is that authors and publishers need to be paid by Google when their work is used online. Google has argued that copying work to an online format should be protected under the legal doctrine of âfair use,â since it offers a public benefit and may actually help people find books they want to buy.
Last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, ruled in favor of Google. Now the Authors Guild is asking for a Supreme Court review, Russo said.
âOur charge is to protect the writing life, or whatâs left of it, which I take to mean making sure thereâs something left for the best of todayâs young writers, who are coming into a publishing landscape much different than the one I entered,â Russo said.
Part of his effort includes helping younger authors sell their books. In recent years, he was asked to write jacket blurbs for two up-and-coming authors, Eddie Joyce and Lori Ostlund, and ended up loving both books. So he wrote the blurbs, but he also got on the phone and called their respective publicists. He invited both authors to come to Portland and do live events with him, as he interviewed them before an audience. Joyceâs event was last March at Think Tank and Ostlundâs was in October at Space Gallery.
âWriting is such a lonely profession, so when Richard Russo welcomes you into the fold, you feel like a writer,â said Joyce, 40, of Brooklyn, New York. âWhenever I get depressed about writing I think, âWell, Richard Russo liked my book.â And that is a powerful thing.â
Joyce, whose book âSmall Merciesâ is based on his childhood neighborhood on Staten Island, said that reading Russoâs novels about working-class people with recognizable struggles was a revelation to him. Before that, he didnât have a clear sense that fiction could be about âregular peopleâ and not just millionaires, spies or wizards.
THE STORY GOES ON
Russo loves a good story. He says his father, who worked road construction and was separated from his mother, was a âwonderfully entertainingâ man who spent much of his time telling stories to other working men in bars.
Russoâs father could take a story that Russo himself had told him, and re-tell it so often, with so many changes, that eventually the story was about Russoâs father.
Russo gave that quality to Sully, the hero of âNobodyâs Fool.â
The idea for his new book, âEverybodyâs Fool,â came to Russo because of the re-telling of a story. While living in Camden, Russo said he was told of a town police chief who suspected his wife was having an affair, solely based on the fact that he found a strange garage door opener in her car. So he went around town trying out the opener on every garage he could find.
âI thought it was a wonderful story, I didnât care if it was true or not,â Russo said, admitting he doesnât know. âIt made me wonder who would do such a stupid thing. Then I thought, âI know exactly who.'â
He thought of North Bath Police Officer Doug Raymer, a small character in âNobodyâs Fool,â portrayed memorably in the film by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Raymer fires his gun in Sullyâs general direction after he canât get Sully to stop driving his truck on the sidewalk. When Sully then punches the cop in the face, everyone seems to understand.
In âEverybodyâs Fool,â Raymer is now chief of police and his story, including the garage door opener dilemma, is a strong focus. But so is Sully, now 70.
Making Raymerâs story even stranger is that his wife is dead, yet the garage door opener continues to haunt him.
âI knew I was going to like this guy a lot more, I knew there was a reason he did stupid things,â said Russo of writing about Raymer. âBecause Iâve done a lot of stupid things in my life, I have a real affection for fools.â
When asked to list a few of those stupid things, Russo broke into his piercing laugh again, saying, âOh, those are my secrets.â
Located about an hour from Albany near the Adirondack Mountains, Gloversville was the glove-making capital of the nation until about 1950. At that time, the population was around 23,000. Today the population is about 15,000. The median household income was about $26,000 in the 2010 census.
Russo has not lived there since he was a teen, though heâs still very close with a cousin there. After his memoir came out, some locals complained of his depiction of the townâs past, painting a picture of dangerous work at low pay and pollution fueled by corporate greed.
But Russo has never wavered from the emotional ties he feels for the place, especially the debt he feels he owes its people and institutions.
When he got a call about a year and a half ago asking him to be honorary chairman of the committee raising money to renovate the Gloversville Free Library building, he accepted immediately. The library opened in 1905 and had been donated by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. It has never had a major renovation.
So far, the committee has raised about $5.5 million of the needed $7 million-plus, and Russoâs help has been âindispensableâ said Betsy Bachelor, the committeeâs co-chair. On more than one occasion Russo has driven the six hours from Portland to Gloversville, and back again, in one day to attend events, she said. One was a meet-and-greet with area school teachers, another was for the announcement of a large donation.
âWhen he comes to town and talks to people, you can tell heâs in love with this town,â Bachelor said.
Russo says he doesnât mind trading on his name to help the library, though he wouldnât do it for just any cause. He thinks libraries are more important than ever today in a place like Gloversville â which Bachelor called âa very poor community, an abandoned communityâ â because they provide information and life-changing resources to people who need them the most and can afford them the least.
Russo buys all the books he wants, so doesnât often visit the Portland Public Library. But he points to the people crowded into the computer terminal area there all day long as an example of the vital role libraries have as economic disparity grows.
In an address he gave at the Gloversville library in October of 2014, he called that library his âlifelineâ growing up, given that his mother had no household budget for books. He talked about feeling free there, how it was the same feeling as getting his driverâs license, because it allowed âfreedom to travel without adult supervision.â
âIn America, we love stories of self-made men who pull themselves up by their boot straps and no doubt there are such men, but Iâm not one of them,â Russo said at that time. He talked of his father paying his union dues, his mother constantly pushing him toward college, and, âjust as important, I am a product of public education, government-backed student loans and publicly funded institutions like the Gloversville Free Library.â
âDo I have myself to thank for my success?â he said. âDonât make me laugh. I donât even know where my boot straps are.â
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