[In the following review, Case praises the life and vitality of the stories in The Whore's Child and Other Stories.]

The short story's rise to prominence in American letters must be at least partly a consequence of its usefulness to English teachers. Not only is it easier than the novel to “workshop” (to use a questionable term in its most dubious form), it is easier to teach. I remember peering over my freshman English professor's shoulder at the contents page of his copy of the anthology we were using and seeing his handwritten notes alongside each title. “Voice” was scrawled next to Raymond Carver's “Where I'm Calling From,” “Irony” next to Albert Camus' “The Guest.”

The pieces in Richard Russo's first short fiction collection [The Whore's Child and Other Stories] also illustrate the point. One can imagine a great, meaty seminar discussion about that venerable duo Art and Life arising from the title story, in which an elderly nun in a fiction class submits a harrowing and decidedly unfashionable memoir. An ace paper could be written on the many varieties of real and metaphorical contamination in “Poison,” the tale of two authors born in the shadow of the same toxin-spewing mill.

Russo packs a great deal into his stories, and clearly relishes the idea of their being unpacked. Portentous images—a hypodermic needle, an inflamed post-operative incision—abound, pleading for interpretation. The author's skill, especially his ability to create physical and emotional terrain so real you could map it, is such that the pedagogical exercises would in fact be worth any reader's time.

Russo's reversing the now-typical American career trajectory by publishing his initial story collection after establishing his reputation as a novelist is indicative of where his strengths lie. In full-length narratives like Nobody's Fool and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, he captures not merely the peculiarities of place—the grammatical fallacies of supermarket signs, the bends in the course of a river—but the way these details shape lives. Because this involves accumulation and repetition, it is harder to do in the restricted space of a short story. While the novel generally achieves verisimilitude through its expansiveness, its capacity to accommodate the ABBA songs and beer nuts of everyday life, the short story must rely on elision, allowing specifics to suggest a larger, hidden whole. Russo handles this transition masterfully, however, particularly in “The Farther You Go,” a brilliant evocation of the intimacy and alienation of family lift.

The landscape of these stories will be familiar to readers of the author's previous books. Although “Joy Ride” takes its prepubescent protagonist and his wayward mother from Maine to Arizona, Russo remains rooted in New England. Some of his observations about the Northeast have been made before—that it is a land of unfulfilled dreams and hard truths and dying industry—but his characters, often aware of the clichés they inhabit, breathe life into those commonplaces. Portia, the sarcastic young wile of a writer/professor in “Poison,” expresses one of Russo's favorite themes when she says of her husband's moth-eaten sweater, “It means he's a proletarian writer laboring in a sweatshop of tough, honest prose. It means he comes from an ugly mill town and that's who he is and who he always will be.”

Russo's New England is a psychological locale as much as a physical one. In “Buoyancy,” the story of an aging couple on a weekend excursion to Martha's Vineyard, a ravaged panorama symbolizes their wounded marriage:

For some time they'd been sliding from lush green into sepia, summer into autumn. Everywhere there were downed trees, slender birches and lindens caught up on power lines, trunks chainsawed into cross sections and stacked on the roadside, broken limbs, piled up next to gray-shingled houses. Even trees that had survived the hurricane were damaged, their trunks stripped naked and pink under the early September sky.

In “Buoyancy” and “Monhegan Light,” the beautiful New England coastline can be menacing as well, its blinding light and sharp edges corresponding to painful realizations. Never, in Russo's fiction, is escape from this difficult territory truly possible, and it seems fitting that the end of “Joy Ride” finds mother and son on a plane heading back East.

The characters that fill the stories—the frustrated wives, hapless husbands and confused, lonesome children—will also feel familiar to anyone who has read Russo's novels. In “The Farther You Go,” arguably the best story in the collection, a father recovering from prostate cancer reluctantly intervenes in the marriage of his troubled and difficult daughter. After driving his son-in-law to the airport and buying him a one-way ticket to Pittsburgh, Hank, the protagonist, considers using the ticket himself to go visit a woman with whom he once had a brief affair:

Odds are that she's no longer in Pittsburgh. She's probably married again by now, not that it matters, really. I only wanted to see her at some restaurant with half-moon booths where I might tell her about my surgery. For some reason I'm convinced that my brush with mortality would matter to her and that I'd feel better after confessing to someone that I fear the nausea, that I consider it prophetic, a sign that some terrible malignancy remains. … Maybe she would be afraid for me in the way I want someone to be afraid.

Baffled by his daughter's unhappiness and unable to tell anyone (least of all his wife) about his own, Hank imagines intimacy with outsiders—his son-in-law, his former lover—before realizing “where [his] loyalties must be, where they have always been.” The power of Hank's connection to his wife and daughter coexists with a terrible alienation from them, and both are depicted with haunting precision.

The author adopts the perspective of a 10-year-old boy watching the dissolution of his parents' marriage in “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart.” Divided into sections with headings like “Objects,” “Enemies” and “Cost,” the story takes us into Linwood's universe and its shifting constellations of adults. The mysteries in question—sex, money, adult relations—come into increasingly sharper focus as the narrative progresses. Linwood gradually manages to make some sense out of his mother's relationship to his baseball coach and his father's new residence above the barbershop. In the process the slow piecing together of knowledge that marks the movement out of childhood is vividly portrayed.

Occasionally, Russo overplays his hand by seeming to lecture us on his own fiction. At the close of “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” for example, he ties together the boy's coming of age with the final sentence: “It was into this entirely different world that Linwood now fell asleep, sadly grateful that he was not and never had been, nor ever would be, its center.” That is a decent summary of the story's thematic thrust, but it gives the game away: The bewilderment of childhood was never so cleanly resolved. Russo does a disservice to his own rich and complex tale by tying a ribbon around it. Similarly, “The Whore's Child” and “Monhegan Light” are a bit too classroom-friendly, with symbols (fire, lighthouse) scattered like breadcrumbs for students to follow.

The flaw does not diminish Russo's accomplishment, though. The seven stories that make up The Whore's Child pulsate with real life.