Trajectory

March 6, 2017
The four stories in Russo’s (Everybody’s Fool) new collection are all winners, and one is a standout. His familiar blue-collar denizens of dying mill towns are not present here; these characters are professionals, middle-aged or beyond, successful in their careers but feeling weathered by life’s vicissitudes. The trajectory they travel involves coming to terms with life-changing situations and gamely going on. As always, snappy banter defines personality; Russo’s ear for dialogue is superb. In “Horseman,” a female professor’s confrontation with a student plagiarist forces her to acknowledge the coldness in her nature that has kept her from producing significant work and establishing a deep emotional relationship with her husband and son. In “Voice,” a student with acute Asperger’s syndrome is the object of an obsession that embroils a professor in a scandal. The experience leads to a clarifying breakthrough with his domineering older brother. Another strained family relationship is explored in “Intervention” when a Maine realtor gains clarity about his father’s behavior as he comes to terms with a dire medical diagnosis. The final story, “Milton and Marcus,” is the most satisfying: a novelist whose work has lost vitality has a chance to write a movie from one of his forgotten scripts, but to do so he must ignore his own ethical standards. Russo develops these stories with smooth assurance, allowing readers to discover layers of meaning in his perfectly calibrated narration. 75,000-copy announced first printing.

Starred review from February 15, 2017
Four brief but potent and surprising tales of midlife crises from the ever dependable Russo (Everybody's Fool, 2016, etc.).The main characters in each of these stories are accomplished people who are thrust into what initially seem like modest predicaments. The professor in "Horseman" is dealing with a plagiarizing student; the professor in "Voice" is squabbling with his brother on a vacation in Italy; the real estate agent in "Intervention" is having a hard time moving a hoarder's home; and the novelist in "Milton and Marcus" is wary of the producers asking him to revisit a screenplay he sketched out years before. But with a keen eye for detail, dashes of humor, and a knack for bouncing his characters' presents against their pasts, Russo makes these stories robust studies about the regrets they've picked up over the years. In "Voice," the longest and best of this batch, the professor's estrangement from his brother stokes memories of a recent scandal over his treatment of a closed-off student, which in turn influences his careful flirtation with a woman in his tour group. For the professor in "Horseman," the bad student is a prompt for her to consider whether her professional coolness has served her well either in academia or her home life. As ever, Russo is superb at finding spots of comedy in these situations. The hoarder's home has "an espresso machine the size of a snowmobile"; the frustrated screenwriter thinks, "a smart man would've left it right there, but he didn't seem to be around." This gives the four stories a peculiar sameness; the narration shares a melancholy/buoyant tone regardless of setting. But the autumnal mood fits for these tales of reckonings, and Russo rarely wastes a word, interweaving details and dialogue into master classes on storytelling. "Some writers have less fuel in the tank than others," one of his characters laments, but Russo himself is chugging along just fine.

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Starred review from April 1, 2017
In a cohesive and astute collection of short stories, Russo eschews the middle-class working Everyman he portrays in such novels as Everybody's Fool (2016) and revisits ground familiar to fans of his academic satire, Straight Man (1998), and the poignant Bridge of Sighs (2008). In doing so, he probes the tender egos and fractured psyches of academics and writers and ponders the tenuous ties that bind brother to brother, father to son, husband to wife. The lopsided world of the modern university is exposed when a professor's confrontation with a plagiarizing student challenges her own career and marriage in Horseman, while a semiretired professor is conned into accompanying his brother on a trip to Venice, where the exotic change of scene serves only to remind them of failed relationships at home and abroad. A struggling real-estate agent faces an emotional and physical crisis in Intervention, while an erstwhile screenwriter navigates Hollywood's mercurial egos in Milton and Marcus. Getting into the minds of Russo's characters, no matter their background, is a singularly satisfying journey. Very few writers so thoroughly embrace human foibles, or present them in such an accepting and empathic manner.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2017

Pulitzer Prize winner Russo returns with four not-so-short stories featuring protagonists who aren't blue collar, as his protagonists often are. For instance, "Voice" features a semiretired academic pressured by his brother into traveling to Venice for the Biennale. With a 75,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2017

Of these four short fiction pieces from Pulitzer Prize winner Russo, two are English Department tales, although neither is as antic as his Straight Man, arguably the best novel ever in this genre. In the relatively tepid "Horseman," a professor deals with a problematic plagiarizing student; in "Voice," an elderly professor is conned into a tour of Venice, possibly (or not) to reconcile with his egoist brother while anguishing over an awful incident with a student with Asperger's. The antic is more present in "Intervention," where a real estate agent is asked to deal with a serious medical condition, an insistent and erratic property owner, and a weird prospective customer. "Milton and Marcus" offers an inactive novelist whose screenwriting career may suddenly revive when a long-forgotten "idea" comes to light and he is invited to the Jackson Hole retreat of aging superstar William Nolan and a bunch of Hollywood operators; this one sends up the film industry in a way that does honor to the aforementioned Straight Man. The latter two stories are the best. VERDICT A bit uneven but with many high points, this collection is not as engaging as the author's world-class long fiction, but still, be aware, this is Richard Russo. [See Prepub Alert, 11/27/16.]--Robert E. Brown, Oswego, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.