Trajectory

Richard Russo

Allen and Unwin, £17.99

Review by Nick Major

Most people think life follows an odd sort of trajectory, the arc of which looks like that of a cleanly thrown baseball. There is the sudden catapulting excitement of youth, which reaches

a high-point just before the onset of middle-age, and then the long slow descent to death, when you’re abandoned in the long grass. Of course, it’s all bushwa. But if we were to plot the protagonists in Richard Russo’s new (long) short stories on that haphazard line, three out of four would be – unhappily – on the downward curve.

Nate is a depressed, semi-retired English professor on a Biennale group vacation to Venice. He has recently had his teaching contract “quietly severed” after an incident with a student, “the Mauntz girl”. Ray is a realtor in Maine struggling to make a living after the recession. His economic and psychological woes are compounded by a newly discovered brain tumour; and Ryan is a washed-up screenwriter whose wife has cancer. He is invited to a meeting with

a director and a famous actor on a mountaintop in Wyoming to discuss turning one of his old screenplays into a film. Our fourth protagonist is Janet Moore. She is younger than these forlorn men, but, like Nate, also an English professor. Her marriage is more of a prolonged argument than a relationship, and she is dogged by a sense her writing life lacks a “voice”, that she is merely

“an implied writer. A shadow. A ghost”.

This is all sounds thoroughly depressing. But Russo does not write pathos. Although he has previous form on writing about academic life, namely in his campus satire Straight Man, he is renowned for his comic blue-collar novels, like Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls, his Pulitzer Prize-winning story about Miles Roby, who runs a diner in the eponymous rustbelt town. The characters in Trajectory – Ray aside – might come from a different class, but, similarly, their world is not allowed to become merely a reflection of their own thwarted psyches.

Janet, for instance, cannot rid her mind of a children’s poem about a horseman galloping hither and thither. When she mistakenly tells her colleague Joe Hope about her obsession, “she might have predicted he’d turn it into a joke, and the very next afternoon, emerging into the quad after class, she heard her name shouted, and there was Tony bestride the library steps in a jockey stance, bent knees together, hands out in front, gripping invisible reins, his butt lowering and rising rhythmically”. But Russo does not reduce life to a frivolous joke, quite the opposite. His stories contain eloquent meditations on pain and suffering. He just understands that if we can’t laugh at life, we can’t even start to take it seriously.

These are not really stories of the exterior world. Russo gives us enough to know we are in Venice or Maine, and events happen, and they are important, but the bulk of the good writing consists of characters reflecting on how their lives have taken on a particular shape, and how they go about recovering their past. Near the end of Intervention – the creme of the crop – Ray finds himself emptying a client’s house in a desperate bid to make a sale. Sorting through their possessions, he wonders what bearing the past has on the present. “Life was full of mysteries, large and small. They also tended to pile up. Boxes and boxes and boxes of the inexplicable, until you could barely move among the clutter. Worthless crap, most of it, but when you took in the sheer mass and weight of it, how could you not be discouraged when the time came to clean house, and where did you begin?”

Underpinning this is a deeper question: are we the authors of our own lives?

This is a particularly American question; America – at least theoretically – is the land of the self-made man and woman. Janet and Nate both wonder if they are living a mistaken life. Nate hates his brother, but “say this for Julian, a career salesman: he’s lived the life he was meant to live and followed the only trajectory that truly suits him, from start to finish”. He is drawn to “the Mauntz Girl” because she has ‘a voice’ but refuses to speak to anyone. It is no wonder he wants to know who is behind the writing. Reflecting on his subsequent mistakes, he concludes that “life is, seemingly by design, a botched job”.

Yes, it is botched; Russo’s stories, however, are beautifully accomplished.