[In the following review, Deignan presents a critical reading of the stories in The Whore's Child and Other Stories, commending Russo's emphasis on examining the “act of storytelling.”]

Literary whippersnappers such as David Foster Wallace and Rick Moody spent the 1990s tinkering with the literary form to great acclaim. It seemed that when you opened any hip collection of stories, or the latest, greatest postmodern novel, you were as likely to see footnotes or characters who shared the author's name as you were to see dialogue and plot twists. Whether or not these formal developments were a passing fad remains to be seen. But what can be said is that, lately, more established mainstream writers have picked up the postmodern scent in the literary air.

Mind you, writers such as Ian McEwan in his acclaimed novel Atonement or Richard Russo in The Whore's Child, his new collection of short stories, are not interested in the kind of wink-wink formal play one gets from younger literary pranksters. Instead, Russo, McEwan, and others have examined the very process and act of storytelling itself. This may sound like a different page in the same deconstructionist book, but it's not.

In part, Foster Wallace and the others have been peeling back the curtain of authorship and demystifying, even satirizing, the craft (and hype) of fiction writing. Works such as Atonement have almost an opposite effect. As anyone who has read this novel's powerful final pages will tell you, it raises philosophical questions about fiction but does so in a way that actually reinvigorates the novelist's craft, heightening the mystery, power, and tension that (according to traditionalists, anyway) should be the main ingredients of all fiction.

A MYSTERIOUS NUN

“The Whore's Child,” Russo's first story, has the same effect. The story is set largely in a college fiction-writing class, a detail that would normally make this reader skip to the next story. More ominously still, Russo's story is narrated by a professor whose marriage is on the rocks and whose recent, much-hyped novel was ultimately a disappointment. The unlikely center of the story is actually Sister Ursula, who “belonged to an all but extinct order of Belgian nuns who conducted what little spiritual business remained to them in a decrepit old house purchased by the diocese seemingly because it was unlikely to outlast them.” Russo continues:

She appeared in class that first night and settled herself at the very center of the seminar despite the fact that her name did not appear on my computer printout. Fiction writing classes are popular and invariably oversubscribed at most universities, and never more so than when the writer teaching it has recently published a book, as I had done the past spring.

Publishing the kind of book that's displayed in strip-mall bookstores bestows a celebrity on academic writers and separates them from their scholarly colleagues, whose books resemble the sort of dubious specialty items found only in boutiques and health food stores. I'd gotten quite a lot of press on my recent book, my first in over a decade, and my fleeting celebrity might have explained Sister Ursula's presence in my classroom.

In her first submission, Sister Ursula writes: “In the convent, I was known as the whore's child.” These passages reveal several broader strengths of Russo's collection: powerful sentences, subtle humor, and, perhaps most interestingly, a fascination with what today is euphemistically known as “spirituality.”

In “The Whore's Child,” it's quickly clear to the narrator/professor that Sister Ursula is writing a memoir, not fiction. She lived, as a young girl, “in a Belgian convent school where the treatment of the children was determined by the social and financial status of the parents who had abandoned them.” Sister Ursula is clearly haunted by the ghost of her parents. She longs for her father to return to the convent and claim her, once even comparing him to Jesus on the cross.

During the workshops, the much younger students offer Sister Ursula feedback, some of it simplistic (“It's a victim story”), some banal (“Isn't there a lot of misogyny in this story?”). Russo also has fun with the university setting, noting, for example, that the misogyny comment was offered by “a male student who I happened to know was taking a course with the English department's sole radical feminist, and was therefore alert to all of misogyny's insidious manifestations.”

Equally amusing: When Sister Ursula finally concludes her grueling story, she says that this was her first college course “and she wanted the other students to know that she had enjoyed meeting them and reading their stories, and thanked them for helping her with hers. All of this was contained in the final paragraph of the story, an unconsciously postmodern gesture.”

But Russo never descends into mere satire throughout The Whore's Child. This is not a perfect collection of stories, but his characters have plenty of depth. Some of their trials and tribulations may seem all too familiar, yet they struggle genuinely (if not always successfully) to understand their place in a world that often requires blissful ignorance or willful deception.

It is to Russo's credit that, in “The Whore's Child,” he allows one of the fiction-class students (always a safe target for mere satire) to reveal the dramatic mystery of Sister Ursula's story, one that even she could not unravel. This story, after all, is not solely about one wounded woman but also how the author of any given narrative—or the liver of a given life—is severely limited in self-knowledge. Others inevitably alter and shape the narrative, whether we want them to or not.

“I was writing what you call a fictional story after all” is all Sister Ursula can say to the professor, who has been affected by the nun in complicated ways.

WRITERS AND ARTISTS

Most of the seven stories in The Whore's Child are breezily told and are about writers or artistic types. Again, this is generally troublesome in short fiction. Such stories can become mired in the swamp of insular academic arguments, upper-middle-class life, and artistic pretension. Russo's brainy characters are all the more surprising, given his success as a novelist portraying the blue-collar world. In Nobody's Fool (1994) he gave us Sully, a sympathetic fellow with a limp, down on his luck, yet unable to resist sabotaging himself once again. (The book was later made into a fine film directed by Robert Benton, starring Paul Newman, Melanie Griffith, and Bruce Willis.) His last novel, Empire Falls, also set in a depressed town, won him a much-deserved Pulitzer Prize. (Russo did publish an academic semi-satire called Straight Man in 1997.)

In The Whore's Child, thankfully, the writers and professors are not defined solely by their careers or aspirations. In fact, their concerns are not so different from the blue-collar folk of Nobody's Fool or Empire Falls: the advance of age; the fleeting joys and inevitable complications of love, marriage, and children. The two writers at the center of “Poison” escaped from a depressed mill town, but their youth continues to cast a long shadow over their bookish adult lives. “So, this is how successful writers live,” the pretty young wife of a gloomy writer/teacher says, to his childhood pal and his own wife, upon visiting the latter couple's new summer home. “Poison,” however, is not about literary competition. Instead, it explores how two men see the world, and the past, so differently. It is also about the ties that bind men and their fathers, whether the sons like it or not.

‘MY OLD MAN POISONED YOURS’

Gene, the gloomy teacher, has not done as well financially as the unnamed narrator, who has sold some work to Hollywood. “A funny place. … Here I'd worked on the [movie] project for almost a year and didn't have a thing to show for my participation, except for a third of a million dollars. More than I'd made on my six novels combined.” (Russo, too, has worked on several Hollywood scripts.)

On one level, “Poison” explores how so much of what is written, from novels to op-ed pieces, is not necessarily the product of good language and sound policy but instead personal psychology. “You're telling me it doesn't bother you that my old man poisoned yours?” asks Gene, whose dad was a foreman to the narrator's father back in the mill town. As college students inflamed by 60s-era rebellion, both despised their fathers' lives. While the narrator has moved on (though not forgotten), Gene remains stuck in a perpetual state of adolescent rebellion. Even his young wife mocks his grubby wardrobe. “He thinks of this as his Thoreau sweater. The badge of welcome poverty.” Later she comments, “It means he's a proletarian writer laboring in the sweatshop of tough, honest prose.”

It gets to a point where nearly every character in “Poison” is pondering what everything “connotes,” from the food and wine to their career choices. It's as if the characters read each other as they would, well, a short story.

But again, for all of the writerly in-jokes, Russo ultimately aims for higher stakes. “We could shut [the mill] down, the two of us,” Gene proposes, knowing that these two local boys who made good are perhaps the only ones who could “wage that final, unwinnable battle with the past.” Though the narrator may be content in the present, he still gives his old pal's suggestion serious thought, much to the dismay of the narrator's wife.

‘GOD LIT THIS ONE’

Marriage is given lengthier treatment in “Buoyancy,” “The Farther You Go,” and “Monhegan Light,” though the latter explores the fallout from a marriage. Interesting, if a bit clichéd, “Monhegan Light” is about a man who never appreciated his wife until after she died and her extramarital affair is revealed.

When the story begins, Martin, a Hollywood photography director, is traveling to the titular island, “a middle-aged man next to his fetching, far younger traveling companion.” After casually making an obscene gesture, Martin scolds his flashy blonde lover (who is no bimbo, it should be noted). She dismissively responds: “Well, old man, I've spent a lot of money on these boobs.”

Though traveling with his new lover, Martin is going to meet the man with whom his deceased wife carried on an affair for two decades. The affair was essentially revealed when Martin discovered an erotic painting of his wife. Approaching the island where his dead wife's artist/lover resides, Martin (who illuminates the false reality of movie sets) is struck by the natural beauty. “Don't be jealous, babe,” his young lover says. “God lit this one.”

Readers should enjoy wrestling with the number of subtle allusions to religion and God in Russo's collection. In “Monhegan Light,” this reference illustrates the story's key conflict—between what is artificial and what is genuine. Martin, the cynical Hollywood technician with a biologically enhanced girlfriend, confronts the nearly Hemingway-esque painter who captured the natural beauty of his wife in a way Martin never could.

The men—both of whom live to capture and reflect people and images—do not fight, but instead drink beer and chat about their respective trades. “The light's about finished for today, Martin. … The best light's usually early. The rest is memory. Not like the bastard business you're in,” the painter says.

None of the “Monhegan Light” characters are quite as one-dimensional as they might sound here. Still, by contrasting the romantic, passionate artist and the superficial Hollywood moviemaker, Russo is swimming in the shallow end of his fictional waters. After asking why the artist painted his wife after her terminal disease set in, Martin adds, “She wasn't what you'd call a beautiful woman.” The painter dramatically responds: “No, Martin, she wasn't what you'd call a beautiful woman. She was one of the most beautiful I've ever laid eyes on.”

“Monhegan Light” concludes with a revealing comic scene. It also fleshes out nicely the entire collection's thread of how humans see—and more often, have difficulty seeing—what is true and what is false about each other.

THE ANXIETY OF FATHERHOOD

“The Farther You Go” is a classic portrait of male anxiety, told in a choppy but ultimately satisfying way. Following an operation upon the most sensitive—physically and psychologically—part of his body, Hank is told that his daughter has just been struck by her husband. Hank's reaction is, to say the least, understated. Nevertheless, Hank is enlisted to escort the offending man to the airport, his daughter's marriage essentially over. One reason for both Hank's participation and his understatement is that his daughter lives too close for comfort to the home he shares with his wife.

Deftly, Russo explores the subtle discomforts of fatherhood, particularly when adult children are nearby screwing up their own lives. “The Farther You Go” (note the parental suggestion of the title) moves in fits and spurts until Hank is at the airport and is overwhelmed by both the memory of an ex-lover and the weight of his current physical (and marital) state. Russo's conclusion is wonderfully executed, portraying both the contentment and fear that do battle in Hank's life.

Two remaining stories in The Whore's Child explore love and marriage, but through children's eyes. In “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” the title character turns to Little League baseball when his parents' breakup becomes too frustrating. A bit too long and familiar in its exploration of a young boy's awkward struggles, the story uses a character named Mr. Christie (another religious figure, it would seem) to bring an intriguing layer of romantic complexity.

“Joy Ride” has a similar impact. A mother hits the road at dawn with her twelve-year-old son, seeking to escape her small-town life and husband. The inconvenience and danger of driving cross-country is not exactly fresh, but Russo's exploration of the mother-son relationship is insightful. The story's powerful conclusion, meanwhile, is a knockout. Though darker than most of the stories, “Joy Ride” offers a hard-earned truth that captures what is most impressive about this challenging collection.

When illness befalls the father of the now-older narrator, the mother/son youthful escape has evolved merely into a benign extended vacation. Is this a terrible lie, an awful distortion of the dark past?

In a way, all seven stories in The Whore's Child beg this response to the question: Does it really matter? Whether the subject is childhood angst or, literally, life and death, Russo's stories present us with a world so fickle and unpredictable that sometimes enlightenment can be obtained only by accepting the wisdom contained in half-truths, distortions, or plain old lies.

Of his mother's selective memory in “Joy Ride,” the narrator states matter-of-factly: “This fiction became especially necessary, even essential.” Or as the professor in the title story puts it, slightly more playfully: “We're all liars here, Sister.” As Richard Russo well knows, the same could be said of novelists and short story writers.