Elsewhere: A memoir [Deckle Edge] [Hardcover]

From his Pulitzer Prize-winning EMPIRE FALLS to novels like NOBODY'S FOOL and BRIDGE OF SIGHS, Richard Russo has mined a rich lode of stories based on his childhood in upstate New York's Gloversville. Until now, he's held back from writing about his experiences there in a work of nonfiction. Thanks to an invitation several years ago from Granta to contribute to its "going home" issue, he's finally produced this quietly moving memoir. But as much as it reveals some of the pleasures and pain of Russo's early life, the heart of ELSEWHERE is the story of his loving but often fractious relationship with his mother, Jean.

When the 18-year-old Russo was admitted to the University of Arizona in 1967, Jean took advantage of the opportunity to flee her compulsive gambler husband and the upstairs apartment she shared with her only child in her parents' Gloversville home. Driving a 1960 Ford Galaxie he christened the "Gray Death" (a vehicle that could not go in reverse, in a nice bit of symbolism), Russo and his mother embarked on what turned out to be a death-defying cross-country trek. Jean's quixotic decision to abandon a secure, well-paying job with General Electric in Schenectady, expecting she'd easily land a comparable position with the same employer in Arizona, was emblematic of what Russo calls her "intractable determination that was responsible for her seemingly endless suffering."

Soon their prospects diverged. Richard, with his Ph.D. in English, eventually left academia to become a full-time novelist. When Hollywood discovered his work, he added well-paying screenwriting jobs to his resume. But after a brief period of independence in Phoenix, Jean's life turned into a dispiriting odyssey, trailing her son and his extraordinarily patient wife and children from Tucson to Carbondale, Illinois and eventually to Maine. In describing it, Russo offers ample evidence for his belief that his mother "never considered us two separate people but rather one entity, oddly cleaved by time and gender, like fraternal twins somehow born twenty-five years apart, destined in some strange way to share a common destiny."

After Russo accepted a position at Colby College in 1991, it's easy to lose track of his mother's series of moves from one apartment to another, each experience seemingly unhappier than the last. The sequence becomes mind-numbing, perhaps in the way it felt to Russo as he lived it: his mother's complaints about a newly-chosen home; the difficulties of a move; a too-brief period of relative calm and then a crisis that began the cycle all over again. It doesn't take long to realize that something more than what the family referred to vaguely as Jean's "nerves" lay at the root of her psychological turmoil. Russo's patience in parceling out those details displays an admirable economy in both its content and its prose.

The account of his mother's final days in Maine and Russo's reflections on the complicated drama he and his mother acted out are similarly understated and all the more moving as a result. There's no false note of closure or facile comprehension in resigned observations like this one:

"From the time I was a boy I understood that my mother's health, her well-being, was in my hands. How often over the years did she credit me, or my proximity, with restoring her to health? My rock, as she was so fond of saying, always there when she needed me most. My own experience, however, had yielded a different truth --- that I could easily make things worse, but never better."

As Gloversville, when hats and gloves went out of fashion and the low-level factory jobs involved in making them began to move overseas, its economy, dependent on those goods, quickly collapsed. The modest existence the town's workers were able to scratch out before that happened was anything but pleasant. There's a gruesome description of work in the beam-house, the place the animal hides first were processed at the tannery where his grandfather worked as a glove-cutter, and a catalog of the toxic brew of by-products the chrome tanning process released into the town's air and water. Russo's home town was the "canary in the mine shaft" for other small towns where "you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul." His obituary for Gloversville is as moving as anything he's written in his acclaimed novels and an apt companion to the family story.

Whether it's his clear-eyed portrait of the mixture of warmth and frustration that marked his relationship with the woman who called him "Ricko-Mio" or the depiction of his hometown, in its heyday and in its desolation, ELSEWHERE is notable for its lack of sentimentality. That doesn't mean it's lacking in emotion. There are deep feelings coursing through this book. As we learn some of the story of Richard Russo's life, we can begin to appreciate the roots of his skill in transforming it into fiction.

Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg

If you want an "I did this, then I did that, and I . . . I . . . I" passive-read of a memoir, this book is not for you. Rather, Russo tells the story of himself through the story of the person who was the primary force in his life and continues to be, even after her death: his mother. As when reading a novel, the reader must interpret, draw parallels, and analyze words and actions to understand motivations and the subtext. Not only does the book tell the story about one guy who's a writer from upstate New York; like the best works, it also provides insight into the human condition, the inescapable influence of family, and the lifelong effect larger-than-life "characters" have on the children they raise.
In an era when too often the veracity of memoirs is called into question--just because of the voyeuristic, overblown adventures needed to keep contemporary readers engaged--this memoir is thoroughly original. If you have ever read a novel and wondered how much is the author's actual life and how much is fiction, and how the two influence each other, you will love this book.

I have believed for several years now that Richard Russo-- I'm embarrassed to say whose novels I keep buying and have yet to read one of them since life keeps getting in my way-- is the most decent of human beings. I first came to that conclusion when I did read SHE'S NOT THERE by Jennifer Finney Boylan, one of his teaching colleagues at Colby College. Then I heard him read from THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC and my original opinion of him was set in concrete. And as everyone knows, that is not always the case when you actually meet a writer. His decency and kindness seep through in every page of ELSEWHERE as he remembers his mother's life and his taking care of her throughout her many years of undiagnosed obsessive compulsive-disorder. He says in the "Prologue" that he calls this book a memoir because he does not know "what else to call it--a story of intersections: of place and time, of private and public, of linked destinies and flawed devotion. It's more my mother's story than mine, but it's mine, too, because until just a few years ago she was seldom absent from my life."

Mr. Russo was born and grew up in the mill town of Gloversville, New York. If you can write a memoir about a town, then Gloversville is the third subject of this book. It's where the author got his title from: as both he and his mother Jean moved from place to place-- Arizona, Illinois, and finally Maine-- she couldn't wait to get out of Gloversville. Then when she was "elsewhere," she always wanted to move back and did for a short time after she had lost a job in Tucson. When Russo decided in 1967 to go to college in Arizona, she just loaded up their newly-purchased 1960 battleship gray Ford Galaxie and moved with him. Their real-life cross-country trip from upstate New York to Arizona is one of the hilarious parts of this memoir-- and every bit as funny as the fictional one from the movie "Little Miss Sunshine"-- that in many ways will break your heart. Mr. Russo hardly knew how to drive, (his mother could not although she later learned) had had practically no experience on interstate highways and certainly none pulling a trailer. He quickly learned that he should never park the car and trailer anywhere that required him to put the car in reverse. He admits to having a love-hate relationship with Gloversville, himself, and keeps writing about the town in his fiction.

In the 1950's, Jean Russo's condition was simply called "nerves." "This was something the whole family seemed aware of, but no one talked about it." Sound familiar? She was medicated with Phenobarbital after she told her family doctor that the stress of being a single mother and a fulltime worker at GE was causing her "condition," and later with other drugs like Valium. Over the years her condition worsened. Perhaps Mr. Russo should have seen the danger signs; others did. His father, who was separated from his mother, once told him when Russo was twenty-one and both he and his father were very drunk that "I couldn't be your father without being married to that crazy woman." And his father-in-law gave the following advice to his daughter Barbara, upon learning that the newly-wed couple planned to let Russo's mother move in with them until she could find a job and start a new life in Tucson: "Don't do it. If you let that woman in, you'll never be rid of her." When it was too late, Mr. Russo learned, after his daughter was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder and he read a book on the subject, that his mother had been suffering from OCD all these years.

In spite of Mrs. Russo's many problems that threatened to shipwreck her life and those of Richard and his wife Barbara, who surely must be a saint, the author says in a recent interview that all the blessings in his life-- and he admits to many-- and the things he values most is because of his mother. When her troubled life was finally over and she was no longer in a cage, as she had described herself so many times over the years, Mr. Russo scattered her ashes in Martha's Vineyard, and unable to say anything else after both his daughters had spoken, recited that glorious Shakespeare poem that begins "Fear no more the heat o' the Sun/Nor the furious Winter's rages." Not a bad sendoff.

When memoirs-- often by someone the world does not know and should not-- are being published all over the place, it is refreshing to read one by someone like Mr. Russo-- so completely honest-- who has something to say and says it so well.