[In the following essay, Smith provides an overview of Russo's fiction, publishing history, and literary concerns, including Russo's own comments on his career and work.]

The Old Port section of Portland, Maine, where Richard Russo takes PW [Publishers Weekly] to lunch, is not a place where the author's characters would feel at home. Although Portland suffered a postwar decline not unlike the one that befell Russo's fictional upstate New York town of Mohawk, Old Port has since been gussied up. Brick warehouses now hold craft shops and clothing stores; the quietly tasteful restaurants have nothing in common with the Mohawk Grill, that formica-countered mainstay of communal life in both Mohawk and The Risk Pool; and Sam Hall, feckless antihero of the latter novel, would look in vain for a tavern like The Elms, where he could park his son at the bar to eat peanuts while Sam ran up his tab.

North Bath, N.Y., the setting of Russo's new book, Nobody's Fool, just out from Random House, aspires to gentrification, but protagonist Donald Sullivan is less interested in the restored Sans Souci hotel than in making his regular rounds between Hattie's Lunch, the local OTB parlor and the White Horse Tavern. There isn't much in Old Port that would appeal to Sully.

His creator, on the other hand, quickly finds an excellent seafood restaurant and speaks enthusiastically of the summer festival that fills Old Port's streets with musicians and crowds. Russo left Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he had been rapidly promoted as his first two novels were published, to take a position at Colby College in Waterville because he wanted to come back to New England. He is well aware that nowadays the alternative to gentrification too often is dying towns like the ones he portrays in his fiction.

Not that Russo is any kind of grim social realist. A short, sturdily built man of 44, he views the world and its absurdities with the same affectionate amusement he brings to bear on his characters' frequently reckless behavior. His explosive laugh erupts at regular intervals, and he sees his work as having “a kind of spiritual optimism. I don't necessarily hold out any great hope that people's lives are going to change, but I think there's great dignity and the possibility of spiritual progress in struggle. I don't subscribe to the shit happens and then you die' school of either fiction or life.”

He strongly believes, however, in the crucial impact of place on individual destinies, as can be seen in his decision to leave Mohawk and set Nobody's Fool in North Bath, a once-prosperous resort that hit hard times after its mineral springs ran dry in 1868 and now grinds its collective teeth enviously at the flourishing fortunes of nearby Schuyler Springs.

I needed a different kind of environment. There wasn't any sense in Mohawk of a greater day, a kind of mythical past which the inhabitants harked back to as a Golden Age. Also, I needed a rich relative right down the road in order to make comparisons and address the book's central issues of luck and free will and fate. Demographically, Mohawk wouldn't work.

Demographics, broadly defined, are important in all of Russo's novels, which resemble Victorian fiction in their precise location of action within a particular time and place. “Place is inseparable from character. If I try to write books about people before I have a pretty good sense of the places, that's an indication that I don't know the characters as well as I need to. And it's crucial to have a sense of place as process. Sully going to Hattie's first, then the OTB, then the Horse; the rhythms of his life are inseparable from who he is and what he thinks of himself. That comes from some of the real loves of my life in terms of literature, Dickens first and foremost: how do we know Pip in Great Expectations, except in terms of the forge, the blacksmith's shop and the marsh? Many of the contemporary writers I like also have that feeling of the ways in which places and people interact.”

Russo understands this interaction from personal experience. Dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, a dusty blue cotton jacket and a pair of olive-green Keds, he looks like a fairly typical junior faculty member, but his youth in the blue-collar town of Gloversville, N.Y., continues to shape his outlook. “Despite the fact that I have more degrees than anybody should, I've never really been able to shake my sense of being an interloper in the Colby Colleges of the world. The years when I was an undergraduate at the University of Arizona were mightily confusing, because I would be taking classes and living the life of the mind, but every summer I would work construction with my father to earn money. In order to continue in that world of educated people, I had to go back into this other world, where my grammar would change, the actual language that I would speak wasn't the same, the way of looking at things wasn't the same.

Most of the jobs my father had were backbreaking, brutal. The worst was a summer I spent as a grader, bent over spreading dirt along a highway and making it absolutely level. By the end of the day—talk about metaphors for the way you think of yourself and look at things!—it took forever just to straighten up. My life has become easier through education, but I know what real work is. That sense of these people and their lives trails behind me and is always a factor in my imagination. As a younger man, I equated success with putting that world behind me. In terms of my writing, in terms of my heart, it took me a long time to discover it meant more than anything else.

The first draft of Mohawk helped Russo find his subject matter. Always an avid reader, he was almost finished with his Ph.D. in American literature by the time he realized he wanted to create novels as well as study them. After writing some short stories and an aborted novel, he produced a 500-page manuscript about Anne Younger, who later evolved into one of many characters in Mohawk but in this draft was its embittered heroine, living in the Southwest.

“The novel was floundering; the only parts of it that were alive at all were the flashbacks in Mohawk, the town she had left.” When a friend read the manuscript and observed that all of the interesting parts of the book were in the past, “his comments made crushing sense. Of course, it involved throwing out everything except 75 pages, admitting that I'd written a bad book and going back and writing a better one.”

Nat Sobel, who had admired Russo's stories in various literary magazines, took on Mohawk and has been the author's agent ever since. “He continues to get most of his clients by reading literary magazines and doing the kind of work in the trenches that not many literary agents are willing to do. What I like about working with Nat is that we don't draw hard and fast lines between what he does and what I do: I trust his aesthetic judgment as well as his business judgment; he isn't always putting the dollar sign first as we think about my career.”

Sobel sold Mohawk to Gary Fisketjon at Vintage Contemporaries, in the mid-1980s a white-hot publisher of bestselling, critically praised paperback originals. “My initial reaction was that being in paperback first diminished me, but Nat explained that I ought to be damn well thrilled, given the other authors in the series; I was going to breeze along on Raymond Carver's coattails! It couldn't have been a better thing to do. They had a 35,000 first printing; if I had gone to Random House in hardcover, I would have been lucky to get 6000, and there probably would have been no paperback.”

When Fisketjon left Vintage for Atlantic Monthly Press shortly before Mohawk was released in 1986, Russo was faced with a difficult decision about what to do with his next novel. “Gary did an incredible job of editing Mohawk. It had a lot of first-novel difficulties, and he really improved it. But I tremendously liked David Rosenthal [whom Random House proposed as Russo's new editor], and there was already a group of people who were devoted to me and my work. The sales force has always been wonderful, and when they decide as they have done with me that they're really behind your work, you'd be a damn fool to think about joining another publisher.”

Russo's relationship with Rosenthal, who published The Risk Pool in hardcover in 1988, has proved to be quite different from the one he had with Fisketjon. “David is less of a blue pencil editor than Gary was. At a couple of crucial stages in Nobody's Fool we've gotten together and just talked; he hasn't been sitting down with the manuscript and writing things in the margin, but rather, offering spiritual guidance and thoughts on the content. The same was true of The Risk Pool. As a result of what Gary did on Mohawk, which badly needed it, I learned so much and became so much more relentless in the revision process that The Risk Pool didn't require as much close sentence-to-sentence attention.”

Written while his father was dying and based largely on their relationship, The Risk Pool is the most personal of Russo's novels, a fact reflected in the first-person narration by Sam Hall's son Ned. “It has just as wide a canvas as my other books—wider, in terms of time, because it takes place over 30 years, while Nobody's Fool takes place over two months—but everything was filtered through the very narrow focus of Ned's camera. Nobody's Fool has a wide-angle lens; we're never inside any of the characters looking out, we're always outside looking in.”

That wide-angle focus is what Russo loves in 19th-century novels, which he points to as the strongest influence on his own work “because of their ambition, their wanting to see more of the world, their desire not just to look at the interior workings of a single character and situation. Kafka's Metamorphosis is a classic of that second kind, and the shape of literature has not been quite the same since it was written. But all writers have books they would like to have written and other books that, despite their greatness, are not ones they themselves would have wanted to write. I admire Metamorphosis, but if the great books were up for grabs, I would prefer to have written Middlemarch! Some writers want to go deeper and deeper, while others strive for breadth. Breadth is more appealing to me.”

Getting that breadth in Nobody's Fool turned out to be an agonizing process. “The Risk Pool was a gift,” says Russo. “Exactly what the book was about was clear to me from the beginning, and I never made any big mistakes. Nobody's Fool was excruciating. I started it in Sully's voice and wrote hundreds of pages before I found that his point of view was too limiting. I wrote a second draft as a series of narrations through various characters' eyes, then I had to throw that away when I realized this was an omniscient book; I needed to be outside all the characters with access to their thoughts.”

Random House thinks highly enough of the resulting canvas to send the author on a month-long publicity tour across the States; in July, he'll spend a week in England promoting the British edition. Pleased as always by his publisher's enthusiastic backing, Russo isn't looking forward to being separated from his wife and two daughters; he's also got a thorny, which-book-next? problem to solve. Some 200 pages into “an academic comedy,” he feels the pull of “a darker book that may be a Mohawk book” and that might yet elbow its way onto his desk to become his current project.

One thing he tries not to worry about is the fear of repeating himself that led to some disagreements with Random House about promotional copy Russo felt overstressed similarities between The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool. “My editor and agent have convinced me that I was overly concerned with falling into a rut, of forever writing father-son stories set in upstate New York. Like every writer, I'm afraid of being pigeonholed, but I'm trying to balance that fear with a willingness to look at my career and say that already the books I've written suggest that certain things are important to me, and I probably ought not to be all that interested in forsaking them for the sake of novelty. It took me a while,” he adds with a laugh, “to realize it was okay to write books that feel like Russo novels!”