The Destiny Thief

Any Good Books, November, 2019

The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life

Richard Russo (2018, Vintage)

    Richard Russo came late to writing fiction. In his twenties, he studied for a Ph.D. in American literature, and was on his way to becoming a teacher. But before he acquired that degree, he also pursued a Master of Fine Arts in fiction. He wasn't good at it yet, but he had some idea of what he needed to learn. So, as the academic career got off the ground–endless sections of freshman composition at Penn State–he returned to his first novel, of which his teacher had liked only the portion set in his home town in upstate New York. "They weren't exactly good, those forty pages, but they were mine, which was more than could be said for the other two hundred." 

     Bad news, he thought, since he'd spent his twenties getting as far from Gloversville as he could manage. That said, however, if he was doomed to be from Gloversville (where his grandfather had actually been a glove cutter), why not see what could be made of it? "I needed not only to claim as my own the very place I'd been fleeing for so long but also to lose myself there, to give my full attention to the kind of people whose lives were, at least to me, both important and essential."

 

    In the meantime, he had learned some of the skills of writing fiction, which he has gone on to teach. I was especially interested in the essay "What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience." When he commended to his students the practice of telling the story from the omniscient point of view, they tended to resist. Maybe it means they haven't read enough literature; novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries favored the godlike point of view. Maybe they're just too young: "As we mature we see patterns, and those can resolve themselves into worlds. We want to tell readers how those worlds (as well as the real one they're based on) work. At twenty-five or thirty, not many writers are anxious to assume so much responsibility." Certainly, I have read stories from this century that would have been greatly improved if the writer had seen fit to explain a little more.

 

     Russo relishes the mastery of Charles Dickens. His essay on The Pickwick Papers shows how a youthful Dickens overran the bounds of the sketches he'd been commissioned to write. "By the time we're not quite halfway through the book, both we and Dickens are suddenly aware that he's writing a novel; he's begun to plant narrative seeds that will bear fruit in later chapters, to defer dramatic payoffs and in so doing increase their power." Dickens has already begun to intermingle the pathos of the world he sees around him with an irresistible comedic streak. No wonder he's still being read. 

    Dickens was writing for money, of course, and under the deadline pressures of serial publication. Russo has much to say about craft and art, and how they may (or may not) survive in the world of commerce. Creative writing programs proliferate, but it seems unlikely that the audience for fiction is actually growing. "Popular culture tells us that those who fail didn't want success badly enough, as if hunger and faith were the best predictors of it. In reality, hunger and faith, absent talent, or at least a certain facility, is more often a prescription for heartbreak." 

    Howbeit, we must attend to our craft, if art is to have a chance; there are no guarantees. "That art should be so elusive is deeply mysterious. In many respects it seems so straightforward. What art demands of us has remained constant down through the centuries–that we slow down, observe, contemplate, court quiet, practice stillness, live as if we have all the time in the world, knowing full well that we don't."