I didn’t love Empire Falls or Bridge of Sighs, both novels by Richard Russo.  But his collection of short stories entitled The Whore’s Child has made me a grudging aficionado of his writing, if not of his take on life.  In short bits, his illuminations of the dark side of human nature work really well. The stories are well-constructed worlds of vividly rendered characters, low-point but still boiling situations of conflict, and harsh resolutions that settle conflict but resolve nothing. Characters like sister Ursula, the whore’s child; the mother who takes off in “Joy Ride”; the father who moves into the apartment over the barbershop and the decent base-ball coaching, collection-passing Mr. Christie in “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart”; and the numerous over-fifty writers who show up in the rest of the stories (self-portrait or skewering of friends?) are so well developed by Russo that within only pages of meeting them it is as if an entire novel had been devoted to them. The characters in Russo’s short stories are very real and his plots ring true. His characters are all in pain and he uses his plots to set them in rebellion against their pain; they are shuffling along or striding defiantly or toddering on heels but they are never standing still. Russo gives them no rest on their march to Calvary, and Calvary is where they are all headed.

Because for Russo there is the dark side to humanity, and there is the ignorant side, but there is no light side or warm side or loving side to be found, except perhaps in a young child (before they grow into bullies or bullied) or in the rare, very rare, case of a good man or a patient man (or wife).  Even in these rare cases, the goodness will be accompanied  by suffering — there is little reward in goodness — and everyone suffers in Russo’s world.  Everyone has their cross to bear, and it is a cross of their own making, a cross created through hypocrisy and compromise and irrelevancy, and pity the poor suckers who try to escape, like the mother in “Joy Ride” or the wife in “Buoyancy” (whose escape is a breakdown and then she bravely comes back to reality only to have her husband continue in his own self-preservation through subjugation).  The only character who makes it through to her own happiness is Laura, dead now but forever preserved by her lover’s careful paintings that show her waiting, still hopeful, in one of my favorite stories, “Monhegan Light”.

In Russo’s world, there is no love that does not compromise, falter, re-boot itself on false premises of need or desire, and then crash once again, and again, and again.  There are stories in which couples have been together for a long time, so long they know what the other is thinking, but even then:
“I just look at her, wondering if she might also have intuited that I just missed getting on a plane to Pittsburgh, that I had a lover fifteen long years ago who I want to tell things I can’t tell my wife.
‘You think I don’t know you after thirty years?’ she says, as if in answer to my unspoken question.
‘Not intimately,’ I tell her.”

I agree with Russo that no one really knows another person intimately.  No one can know the swirl of thoughts, past and present, desires and yearnings, that another harbors within. But I part ways dramatically with Russo on the conclusion. Love can still be constant and strong, even if partly ignorant, occasionally compromised, and routinely taken for granted. Life, even a difficult one, can still have moments, hours, days, of light and beauty and happiness, due to what happens between friends, parents and children, and lovers.  A whole convent of Belgian nuns is going to have a few good eggs who will find each other and be friends; within a faculty, colleagues can become true supports; within a marriage, trust can be based on a reality of affection and loyalty; and between parents and kids, reliance of the latter on the former is the norm, it usually works, and it passes on from generation to generation. Life is not suffering, although it contains suffering; love is not compromise, although it contains compromise; and forgiveness is not just a concept in self-help books, it is a reality. Forgiveness and release from suffering are the message, after all, of Calvary.