The novels Nobody's Fool and Empire Falls were adapted for successful HBO mini-series which consolidated Richard Russo's reputation as a writer of the first order. Four stories from the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer are gathered in Trajectory.
The first of the quartet of stories, Horseman drills down into two episodes in the professional life of academic Janet Moore, who is married with husband and son. In flashback, we learn of her painful meeting – or `conference’ in jargon - ten years earlier with a rising star in literature studies, one Marcus Bellamy. Aware of his radical whiff and the inevitable popularity of his course among students, Bellamy is smugly self-assured and Janet is an impecunious postgraduate/teaching assistant. Bellamy, in the interests of helping her find her own authorial voice, is unusually harsh in his judgement of her submitted essay. "Oh you’ll succeed just fine, " he told her, waving that concern aside. "You’ll just never be any good."
The effect of his remarks appears to have stayed with the lecturer - is she paranoid and insecure; too conscious about how she appears, or about how she may be judged because of the encounter? Russo is too subtle a writer to answer that one. A decade on, the shoe is on the other foot in any case, and Janet is dealing with the essay submitted to her by a veritable chancer - she knows the male student’s essay has involved plagiarism, because she has located the original essay on file.
Yet somehow her feat of detection appears a Pyrrhic victory and her husband, she discovers, cheated in like manner. Juxtaposing the two unrelated incidents, ten years apart, to fascinating effect, Horseman is an absorbing 36-page parable which in the end might not be about much more than the evil of beating yourself up needlessly.
Running to 96 pages, Voice is a much longer story, practically a novella, charting the activities of a small group of cultural tourists from Massachusetts who are attending the Venice Biennale. Among them are two brothers in their sixties, Julian and Nate, who bear different scars from their boyhood. Their father had fled, and their alcoholic mother almost died when the house burned down because of her carelessness with a lit cigarette. Clever and learned, nuanced and sensitive, Voice is addictive in its fidelity to foibles and peculiarities that most of us will recognise.
In Milton and Marcus, a novelist in a dry spell tries to revive his screenwriting career. The story is a quiet masterpiece, somehow surpassing the others, so good that even F Scott Fitzgerald might marvel, while seeing his own stout influence.
In the story Intervention, a real estate agent deals with an alarming medical prognosis while getting along with the job. The 243-page collection is reminiscent at times of the stories of Richard Ford and like much of early Ford material, Russo has also charted blue-collar America. Top-notch stuff.
