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Elsewhere: A memoir Kindle Edition
Anyone familiar with Russo’s novels will recognize Gloversville—once famous for producing nine out of ten dress gloves in the United States. By the time Rick was born, ladies had stopped wearing gloves and Gloversville was on its way out. Jean Russo instilled in her son her dream of a better life elsewhere, a dream that prompted her to follow him across the country when he went to college. Their adventures and tribulations on that road trip were a preview of the hold his mother would continue to have on him as she kept trying desperately to change her life. Recounted with a clear-eyed mix of regret, nostalgia, and love, Elsewhere is a stirring tribute to the tenacious grip of the past.
Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateOctober 30, 2012
- File size1251 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
“Intimate and powerful...an impeccably told tale.” —Julia M. Klein, Chicago Tribune
“A gorgeously nuanced memoir about Russo’s mother and his own lifelong tour of duty spent—lovingly and exhaustedly—looking out for her. . . . Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists . . . in a paragraph or even a phrase, he can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Filled with insights, by turn tender and tough, about human fidelity, frailty, forbearance, and fortitude.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Moving and darkly funny. . . Russo mines grace from his gritty hometown [and] the greatest charm of this memoir lies in the absences of self-pity and pretension in his take on his own history.” —Amy Finnerty, The Wall Street Journal
“Heartfelt and generous.” —Tricia Springstubb, Cleveland Plain Dealer
“One of the most honest, moving American memoirs in years... Russo's straightforward writing style is even more effective in Elsewhere [and his] intellectual and emotional honesty are remarkable.” —Michael Schaub, NPR.org
“Rich and layered... an honest book about a universal subject: those familial bonds that only get trickier with time.” —Kevin Canfield, Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Russo conjures the incredible bond between single mother and only child in a way that makes his story particularly powerful.” —Nicholas Mancusi, The Daily Beast
“Russo brings the same clear-eyed humanism that marks his fiction to this by turns funny and moving portrait of his mother and her never-ending quest to escape the provincial confines of their hometown.” —Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
“An affecting yet never saccharine glimpse of the relationship among place, family and fiction.” —Kirkus
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
A few years ago, passing the sign on the New York State Thruway for the Central Leatherstocking Region, a friend of mine misread it as saying laughingstock and thought, That must be where Russo’s from. She was right. I’m from Gloversville, just a few miles north in the foothills of the Adirondacks, a place that’s easy to joke about unless you live there, as some of my family still do.
The town wasn’t always a joke. In its heyday, nine out of ten dress gloves in the United States were manufactured there. By the end of the nineteenth century, craftsmen from all over Europe had flocked in, for decades producing gloves on a par with the finest made anywhere in the world. Back then glove-cutting was governed by a guild, and you typically apprenticed, as my maternal grandfather did, for two or three years. The primary tools of a trained glove-cutter’s trade were his eye, his experience of animal skins, and his imagination. It was my grandfather who gave me my first lessons in art—though I doubt he would’ve worded it like that—when he explained the challenge of making something truly fine and beautiful from an imperfect hide. After they’re tanned but before they go to the cutter, skins are rolled and brushed and finished to ensure smooth uniformity, but inevitably they retain some of nature’s imperfections. The true craftsman, he gave me to understand, works around these flaws or figures out how to incorporate them into the glove’s natural folds or stitching. Each skin posed problems whose resolution required creativity. The glove-cutter’s job wasn’t just to get as many gloves as possible out of a hide but to do so while minimizing its flaws.
Leather had been tanned in Fulton County, using the bark of hemlock trees, since before the American Revolution. Gloversville and neighboring Johnstown were home not only to gloves but to all things leather: shoes and coats and handbags and upholstery. My paternal grandfather, from Salerno, Italy, having heard about this place where so many artisans had gathered, journeyed to upstate New York in hopes of making a living there as a shoemaker. From New York City he took the train north to Albany, then west as far as the Barge Canal hamlet of Fonda, where he followed the freight tracks north up to Johnstown, where I was born decades later. Did he have any real idea of where he was headed, or what his new life would be like? You tell me. Among the few material possessions he brought with him from the old country was an opera cape.
Both men had wretched timing. My father’s father soon learned that Fulton County wasn’t Manhattan or even Salerno, and that few men in his new home would buy expensive custom-made shoes instead of cheaper machine-made ones, so he had little choice but to become a shoe repairman. And by the time my mother’s father arrived in Gloversville from Vermont, the real craft of glove-cutting was already under assault. By the end of World War I, many gloves were being “pattern cut.” (For a size 6 glove, a size 6 pattern was affixed to the skin and cut around with shears.) Once he returned from World War II, the process was largely mechanized by “clicker-cutting” machines that quickly stamped out presized gloves, requiring the operator only to position the tanned skin under the machine’s lethal blades and pull down on its mechanical arm. I was born in 1949, by which time there wasn’t much demand for handmade gloves or shoes, but both my grandfathers had long since made their big moves to Fulton County and staked their dubious claims. By then they had families, and so there they remained. It was also during the fi rst half of the twentieth century that chrome tanning, a chemical procedure that made leather more supple and water resistant, and dramatically sped up the whole process, became the industry standard, replacing traditional vegetable tanning and making tanneries even more hazardous, not just for workers but also for those who lived nearby and, especially, downstream. Speed, efficiency, and technology had trumped art and craft, not to mention public safety.
That said, between 1890 and 1950 people in Gloversville made good money, some of them a lot of it. Drive along Kingsboro Avenue, which parallels Main Street, and have a gander at the fine old houses set back from the street and well apart from one another, and you’ll get a sense of the prosperity that at least the fortunate ones enjoyed until World War II. Even downtown Gloversville, which by the 1970s had become a Dresdenlike ruin, still shows signs of that wealth. The Andrew Carnegie Gloversville Free Library is as lovely as can be, and the old high school, which sits atop a gentle hill, bespeaks a community that believed both in itself and that good times would not be fleeting. On its sloping lawn stands a statue of Lucius Nathan Littauer, one of the richest men in the county, whose extended arm appears to point at the grand marble edifice of the nearby Eccentric Club, which refused him membership because he was a Jew. Down the street is the recently restored Glove Theatre, where I spent just about every Saturday afternoon of my adolescence. There was also a charming old hotel, the Kingsboro, in whose elegant dining room Monsignor Kreugler, whom I’d served as an altar boy at Sacred Heart Church, held weekly court after his last Sunday Mass. Once it was razed, visitors had to stay in nearby Johnstown, out on the arterial highway that was supposed to breathe new life into Gloversville but instead, all too predictably, allowed people to race by, without stopping or even slowing down, en route to Saratoga, Lake George, or Montreal.
How quickly it all happened. In the Fifties, on a Saturday afternoon, the streets downtown would be gridlocked with cars honking hellos at pedestrians. The sidewalks were so jammed with shoppers that, as a boy trapped among taller adults, I had to depend on my mother, herself no giant, to navigate us from one store to the next or, more harrowingly, across Main Street. Often, when we finished what we called our weekly “errands,” my mother and I would stop in at Pedrick’s. Located next to city hall, it was a dark, cool place, the only establishment of my youth that was air-conditioned, with a long, thin wall whose service window allowed sodas and cocktails to be passed from the often raucous bar into the more respectable restaurant. Back then Pedrick’s was always mobbed, even in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. Mounted on the wall of each booth was a minijukebox whose movable mechanical pages were full of song listings. Selections made here—five for a quarter, if memory serves—were played on the real jukebox on the far wall. We always played a whole quarter’s worth while nursing sodas served so cold they made my teeth hurt. Sometimes, though, the music was drowned out by rowdy male laughter from the bar, where the wall-mounted television was tuned to a Yankees ball game, and if anybody hit a home run everyone in the restaurant knew it immediately. I remember listening intently to all the men’s voices, trying to pick out my father’s. He and my mother had separated when I was little, but he was still around town, and I always imagined him on the other side of that wall in Pedrick’s.
I also suspected that my mother, if she hadn’t been saddled with me, would have preferred to be over there herself. She liked men, liked being among them, and on the restaurant side it was mostly women and kids and older people. Though I couldn’t have put it into words, I had the distinct impression that the wall separating respectability from fun was very thin indeed. There was another jukebox in the bar, and sometimes it got cranked up loud enough to compete with whatever was playing on ours, and then my mother would say it was time to go, as if she feared the wall itself might come crashing down. To her, music getting pumped up like that could only mean one thing: that people were dancing, middle of the afternoon or not, and if she’d been over there, she would’ve been as well. A good decade after the end of World War II, Gloversville was still in a party mode, and regular Saturday
festivities routinely continued right up to last call and often beyond, the town’s prosperous citizens dancing and drinking at the Eccentric Club, the more middle-class folk in the blue-collar taverns along upper Main Street or, in summer, at the pavilion at nearby Caroga Lake, the poor (often the most recent immigrants with the lowest-paying tannery jobs) in the gin mills bordering South Main in the section of town referred to as “the Gut,” where arrests for drunkenness or indecency or belligerence were much more likely to be recorded in the local newspaper on Monday than comparable exploits at the Eccentric Club.
By the time I graduated from high school in 1967, you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul. On Saturday afternoons the sidewalks were deserted, people in newly reduced circumstances shopping for bargains at the cheap, off-brand stores that had sprung up along the arterial. The marquee at the Glove Theatre bore the title of the last film to play there, though enough of the letters were missing that you couldn’t guess what it was. Jobless men emerged from the pool hall or one of the seedy gin mills that sold cheap draft beer and rotgut rye, blinking into the afternoon light and fl exing at the knees. Lighting up a smoke, they’d peer up Main Street in one direction, then down the other, as if wondering where the hell everybody went. By then the restaurant side of Pedrick’s had closed, but since I turned eighteen that summer, now of legal drinking age, the other side was no longer off-limits. Now, though, it was quiet as a library. The Yankees were still playing on the television, but Mantle and Maris and Yogi and Whitey Ford had all retired, and their glory days, like Gloversville’s, were over. The half-dozen grizzled, solitary drinkers rotated on their stools when the door opened, like the past might saunter in out of the bright glare trailing ten-dollar bills in its wake. Every now and then that summer of ’67, I’d poke my head into Pedrick’s to see if my father was among those drinking Utica Club drafts at the bar. But, like time itself, he, too, had moved on.
What happened? Lots of things. After World War II, about when men stopped wearing hats, women stopped wearing gloves. Jackie Kennedy did wear a pair at her husband’s inauguration, and that turned the clock back for a while, but the trend proved irreversible. More important, glove making started going overseas where labor was cheap. Gloversville went bust the way Mike Campbell declares his bankruptcy in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, “gradually and then suddenly.” The “giant sucking sound” of globalism arrived decades early and with a vengeance. My maternal grandfather, who, despite being a veteran of two world wars, had been branded a Communist from the pulpit of Sacred Heart Church for being a union man, saw it coming even before crappy Asian-made gloves showed up in the shops, where a few buttons could be sewn on and the gloves stamped MADE IN GLOVERSVILLE. Around Thanksgiving, the trade’s off-season, workers in the skin mills got laid off, and every year it took a little longer for them to be called back. Worse, they weren’t all rehired at once, which practice allowed the shop owners to remind their employees that things were different now. What mattered was moving inventory down the line, not quality. After all, Asians and Indians were doing what the local stiffs did for a quarter of the cost.
My grandfather, who came home from the Pacific with malaria and soon afterward developed emphysema, was by then too sick to fight. He continued to work as always, refusing to cut corners and, as a result, making considerably less money than men for whom slapdash was good enough. The bosses could exploit him, give him the most flawed skins, and treat him like a robot instead of the craftsman he was, but he claimed the one thing they couldn’t order him to do was a bad job. But of course they didn’t need to. You only had to look at how his narrow, concave chest heaved as he struggled to draw oxygen into his failing lungs to know he wouldn’t be anybody’s problem much longer. His wife, who’d also survived the Depression, foresaw a diminished future. She began stocking the pantry with cans of wax beans and tuna fish earlier every year, aware that the layoffs would run even longer, and her husband, growing sicker by the day, would be among the last called back. Jesus on his best day could do no more with loaves and fishes than my grandmother did with a pound of bacon. Still, it was just a matter of time.
None of which had much effect on me. As a boy I was happy as a clam in Gloversville. My mother and I shared a modest two-family house on Helwig Street with her parents. They lived in the two-bedroom, single-bath downstairs flat, my mother and I in the identically configured one above. My grandfather, who’d never before purchased anything he couldn’t pay for with cash out of his wallet, bought the house, I suspect, because he knew his daughter’s marriage was on the rocks and that she and I would need a place to live. Our block of Helwig Street was neighborly, with a corner grocery store situated diagonally across the street. My mother’s sister and her family lived around the corner on Sixth Avenue, which meant I grew up surrounded by cousins. In kindergarten and first grade, my grandmother walked me to school in the morning and was there to meet me in the afternoon, and in the summer we took walks to a lovely little park a few blocks away. On weekends it was often my grandfather who’d take my hand, and together we’d head downtown for a bag of “peatles,” his peculiar word for red-skinned peanuts, stopping on the way back to visit with friends sitting out on their porches. By the time I was old enough to get my first bike and explore beyond Helwig Street, I’d discovered the magic of baseball, and so, wooden bat over my shoulder, mitt dangling from my handle-bars, I disappeared with friends for whole mornings or afternoons or both. At my aunt’s there was a hoop over the garage, and during the long winters my cousin Greg and I kept the driveway shoveled meticulously so we could shoot baskets, even when it was so cold the net froze and you couldn’t dribble the ball. Come autumn I raked leaves, stealing this job from my grandfather, who loved to do it, though he didn’t always have sufficient breath. Sometimes he’d start the job, and I’d finish while he snuck a cigarette around back of the house where my grandmother couldn’t see him. Summers I mowed lawns, and winters I shoveled sidewalks. An American childhood, as lived in the Fifties by a lower-middle class that seems barely to exist anymore, in a town that seemed unexceptional then, and not, as it seems to me now, the canary in the mine shaft.
What follows in this memoir—I don’t know what else to call it—is 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. It’s about her character but also about where she grew up, fled from, and returned to again and again, about contradictions she couldn’t resolve and so passed on to me, knowing full well I’d worry them much like a dog worries a bone, gnawing, burying, unearthing, gnawing again, until there’s nothing left but sharp splinters and bleeding gums.
I keep returning to that wall in Pedrick’s, the one separating the restaurant from the bar. How close she was to where she wanted to be. How flimsy that wall must’ve seemed, the music and laughter leaking through so easily. But then my mother was forever misjudging—not just distance and direction but the sturdiness of the barriers erected between her and what she so desperately desired. I should know. I was one of them.
Product details
- ASIN : B0084U4KR2
- Publisher : Vintage (October 30, 2012)
- Publication date : October 30, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1251 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 258 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #922,113 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #1,917 in Biographies & Memoirs of Authors
- #2,384 in Parenting (Kindle Store)
- #4,504 in Parenting & Relationships (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Rick Russo is the author of six previous novels and THE WHORE'S CHILD, a collection of stories. In 2002, he received the Pulitzer Prize for EMPIRE FALLS. He lives with his wife in Camden, Maine, and Boston.
Photo credit Elena Seibert
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the memoir engaging and well-written. They appreciate the author's skill in describing family dynamics and the intricate narrative style. The book is described as heartwarming, compassionate, and loving. Readers appreciate the author's attention to psychological detail and profound insight into people's motivations. They also appreciate the humor and character development.
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Customers find the book readable and engaging. They describe it as an interesting memoir that reads like a novel. Readers enjoy learning about the author's area. The story is described as candid, honest, and generous.
"...This is a fine and possibly great literary memoir." Read more
"...This memoir was excellent, candid, very readable - and oh so sad, about his mother and her unfulfilled life...." Read more
"...He has the best line in the book,to Richard at age 21, "son, you know your mother is crazy." Incredibly, Richard didn't know...." Read more
"...I thoroughly enjoyed the book." Read more
Customers find the writing quality remarkable and engaging. They appreciate the author's style and compassion for describing family life. The book is easy to read, honest, and sensitive. Readers praise the impressive structure and consider it more than just a memoir.
"...It takes remarkable writing to incite this passion in me and Richard Russo is one of the few writers alive (if not in history) capable to excite me..." Read more
"Smoothly written, interestingly structured, a complex portrait of mental illness, love, and lower middle class life in a wretched town, Elsewhere is..." Read more
"...I still don;t know quite what to say. The writing is wonderful, as expected, and the subject matter is just what he says it will be -- the story..." Read more
"Russo is such a beautiful writer that he can make practically any topic magical and compelling...." Read more
Customers find the memoir engaging with its complex narrative. They appreciate the author's storytelling abilities and the poignant journey through a son and mother's growth. The memoir is described as a good read by Richard Russo, one of their favorite authors.
"...So that it is not a memoir after all, since the entire story is true but it's meant to have a direct point, like a novel, and a plot that develops..." Read more
"...Elsewhere does have a surprising narrative pull...." Read more
"...This memoir was excellent, candid, very readable - and oh so sad, about his mother and her unfulfilled life...." Read more
"...the subject matter is just what he says it will be -- the story about his intricate, demanding, troubled, lovely, maddening, relationship with his..." Read more
Customers find the book heartwarming and relatable. They describe it as compassionate, touching, and thoughtful. The complicated relationship is described as loving yet truthful.
"...interestingly structured, a complex portrait of mental illness, love, and lower middle class life in a wretched town, Elsewhere is a book I'd..." Read more
"...This memoir was excellent, candid, very readable - and oh so sad, about his mother and her unfulfilled life...." Read more
"...his sensibility and point of view, confident, masculine, and full of humanity and kindness too." Read more
"This book is do sad and yet a beautiful, loving tribute from an only son trying to del with a valiant but desperately ill mother, one gripped by..." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's attention to psychological detail and insights into mental health issues. They find the book insightful, kind, and moving. The author provides good insight into people's motivations, whether rational or not. Readers appreciate his sensitivity, understanding, and honest writing style.
"Smoothly written, interestingly structured, a complex portrait of mental illness, love, and lower middle class life in a wretched town, Elsewhere is..." Read more
"...This memoir was excellent, candid, very readable - and oh so sad, about his mother and her unfulfilled life...." Read more
"...I like Russo's voice, his sensibility and point of view, confident, masculine, and full of humanity and kindness too." Read more
"...Perhaps he was calling in her spirit and attention to psychological detail. He mentions "Du Lac"- a novel about isolation and loneliness...." Read more
Customers enjoy the author's humor and character development in this memoir. They find it engaging and humorous when appropriate. Readers praise the author's writing style as authentic and entertaining.
"...occasion of the release of "That Old Cape Magic" and he's delightful, witty and pretty darn humorous...." Read more
"...First, it made me laugh out loud in parts, which was great. But also, the complex relationship we have with our parents is captured so well...." Read more
"...This is funny writing but I really got the sense of how desperately the son needed to keep his mother from chaos and despair...." Read more
"...Especially his mother. But it is written with the same humor and character development as all of his previous novels. I highly recommend." Read more
Customers enjoy the characters' development. They appreciate the author's unique humor and find Richard Russo a talented man with a bizarre mother. The son is devoted and makes a wonderful husband and father despite his childhood.
"...Russo's native town to which we all connect but his ability to honestly depict characters, even himself...." Read more
"...But it is written with the same humor and character development as all of his previous novels. I highly recommend." Read more
"...His books are completely character driven...." Read more
"...I came away feeling that he was a very devoted son that understood how much his mother needed him...." Read more
Customers have different views on the pacing of the book. Some find it moving and engaging, taking them on an emotional journey down memory lane. Others feel the book gets repetitive and boring at times.
"...This book is compulsive. More so than any book I've read in the past seven years...." Read more
"...Beautifully written. Moving...." Read more
"...the book IS written with love, devotion and intensity but it is utterly frustrating & ultimately unsatisfying." Read more
"...of Russo's fictional works, as well as being a virtual tour of my childhood 50 years removed." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2013I've "known" Richard Russo my entire life, not just since 1993 when I read his first three books in trade paperback in fast order: OneTwoThree. They were gifted to me by my Aunt Alain for the same reason that she gifted so much Edward Albee: It was a way to return to my own home. My family has owned a vast farm in one of those small, worn, Central New York Towns since 1836. It is about an hour or so west of the town in which Russo grew up. The house on the farm was built during the towns high point and though our town did not proper as a mill town, it prospered all the same. Small and comfortable at the foot of one of the Finger Lakes (the smallest lake and the smallest town) my hometown was a spiritual center during the 19th century and like most of New York State after the First World War it began to disintegrate. The family dairy farms sustained it for much of the 20th century but today these have been replaced by vast corporate farms where the animals are not named and treated well and no one bothers keeping barn cats to control mice (let alone naming them) and those wooden barns are melting into the ground like a dropped scoop of ice cream in summer. Every road looks like this and every town looks like this. Aunt Alain gave me "Mohawk", "the Risk Pool" and "Nobody's Fool" in one pile and said to me, "This man has captured the honest essence of New York State. Not just the physical grayness of one of its winters and the chipped paint of houses with sagging clothes lines and rusty American made pickup trucks, but the people themselves, flannel shirts with jeans and lifelong, low paying jobs. No one in these towns really has a career and from the outside no one seems to have purpose to his life. There are more mobile homes than houses with basements and there are as many bars as churches."
So I read these books and indeed, Alain had been right. Even had I not grown up in this tiny town at the foot of Owasco Lake, there was a magic to Russo's writing that made these towns feel real to anyone or everyone. Like the books I mentioned and the subsequent "Straight Man," "Empire Falls" (Kudos for the Pulitzer Prize and the brilliant HBO film) "The Bridge of Sighs" "That Old Cape Cod Magic" and his collection of short stories "The Whore's Child" Russo writes very much the way Stephen Sondheim composes. Every single piece is different and the voice is created to best tell the story b8ut when you step back and look at the piece as a whole, there is no question who wrote it. And indeed Richard Russo is as good a writer as Sondheim is a theatre composer.
With that all in mind, I pounced upon "Elsewhere" the moment I knew it existed. Russo has subtitled it "A Memoir" and with the same gossipy curiosity that I hold for all my favorite writers I dove into the book. It's important that we all recognize the difference between a memoir and an autobiography. And autobiography is the self written story of one's life, generally wri9tten late enough in life for the entire story to be told. A Memoir is self written but about just a faction of the life or a particular element to one's life. With "Elsewhere" Richard Russo stretches this definition even farther.
Many of Russo's books end with irony or with a surprise but are handled so well that we are carefully led there. "Elsewhere" is the exception, perhaps because real life, unlike fiction, is not intended to be an escape for people. One who reads novels is searching for an escape from his life and to some, me for example, books are as important as a narcotic to an addict. "Elsewhere" is subsequently very much like some of the novels or stories of Shirley Jackson. We read through this book and we are captivated almost at once. Within the first fifteen pages we begin to feel as though Russo is writing a biography of his mother. It remains this way as their lives proceed (Russo skillfully takes us through five decades in about two hundred pages and at no time do we feel cheated or rushed.) and then - just as most of Shirley Jackson's work - we are shocked to discover at the ending that he has been travelling two roads at once and the surprise ending, and indeed there is a surprise ending, perhaps not "The Lottery," but certainly as big as a memoir could produce, virtually takes the breath away. In some ways, at the very last moment "Elsewhere" becomes a traditional memoir. The meaning of the book and its title become apparent in one powerful page that we could never have guessed and indeed will never arise again.
So that it is not a memoir after all, since the entire story is true but it's meant to have a direct point, like a novel, and a plot that develops and then reveals, like a novel, and the story stops because an author chooses to stop at that point, like a novel. Everything about "Elsewhere" is written as though it were fiction, another genius novel by Richard Russo. Because of the craft that all of this requires, coupled with the self examination of his own life and family, this is perhaps the most brilliant piece of writing that Richard Russo has ever published.
That said, it is not just Russo's native town to which we all connect but his ability to honestly depict characters, even himself. He shows warts and all, as they say, but Russo justifies every quirk and, in the case of "Elsewhere" this justification is not at all easy. Not only does he write it but he makes us buy the premise and it's honest. He is able to explain the quirks in hisw characters the way that we wish we could explain ourselves.
This book is compulsive. More so than any book I've read in the past seven years. Critics are always saying, "I couldn't put it down" but the truth is that this is rarely a pure fact. With "Elsewhere" I sincerely kept the book with me, read at the dining table, rudely in front of company, in the bathroom and in the car, forcing my seventy-seven year old mother to do the driving. ("Only about fifty pages to go," I'd say) I've completed it after an all-nighter and, because of my excitement over a piece of literature of this quality; I opened my lap top and started the first draft of this essay. It takes remarkable writing to incite this passion in me and Richard Russo is one of the few writers alive (if not in history) capable to excite me in this way. I strongly recommend everything Richard Russo has ever written but if you're going to read only one of his books, "Elsewhere" is the one to read.
- Reviewed in the United States on February 4, 2013Smoothly written, interestingly structured, a complex portrait of mental illness, love, and lower middle class life in a wretched town, Elsewhere is a book I'd recommend, with caveats, to adults. They must be serious readers, or blessed with at least one difficult parent, or love and hate their hometown, or be writers. Or be Richard Russo fans, of course.
Russo tells the story very much from "now," as an adult looking back. We're in his head more than in the experience of his younger self who lived it. The first true scene doesn't appear until page twenty-five. The writer's stance in the present and his reliance on voice as much or more than on dramatized action have a distancing effect. This made the book less emotionally involving for me even as its appealing sadder-but-wiser narrator lured me onward.
Elsewhere does have a surprising narrative pull. Somehow Russo generates suspense, probably because although we know from the start the book ends with his mother's death, we crave the story's particulars. The memoir becomes moving as Russo becomes more self-protective and then aware of it. Too late he realizes, or finally admits consciously, that his mother suffered from severe, undiagnosed mental illness her whole life.
This is a fine and possibly great literary memoir.
- Reviewed in the United States on September 1, 2013I'll start by saying I'm a big fan of Russo's writing. I've heard him speak, on the occasion of the release of "That Old Cape Magic" and he's delightful, witty and pretty darn humorous.
I read this book because - it was Russo; and - because like Russo,
I'm an only child with so very much of my life defined by a strong
willful mother.
I might have thought my mother was clinging, or just seemed to need me so much - but after reading Russo's memoir - I have nothing to compare.
This memoir was excellent, candid, very readable - and oh so sad, about his mother and her unfulfilled life. What I do wish I'd also gotten was a tale of how Russo
and his wife managed to keep their balance - both individually -
and as a couple with this extremely heavy burden. But the book was really about his mother - I'm hoping there'll be more about how he came through caring for her his entire life.
Richard Russo is in my small pantheon of the VERY BEST writers today.
Top reviews from other countries
- Anne007Reviewed in Canada on October 25, 2013
5.0 out of 5 stars Richard Russo - The Master
A wonderful memoir, a tableau created out of a real life. A very moving account with which I can totally empathize.
- Alexander BryceReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 10, 2014
5.0 out of 5 stars BEWARE THE SAME BOOK DIFFERENT TITLE
I am a big Russo fan having bought everything he has written so I naturally ordered this one. I have given it 5 stars as it is an excellent book, BUT IT IS THE SAME BOOK AS THE HARDBACK 'ON HELWIG STREET" which I bought last year ( see my complimentary review ). I have now returned it to Amazon and await their comments as to the fairness of marketing the same book twice under a different title and cover.