After eight commanding works of fiction, the Pulitzer Prize winner now turns to memoir in a hilarious, moving, and always surprising account of his life, his parents, and the upstate New York town they all struggled variously to escape.
Anyone familiar with Richard Russo’s acclaimed novels will recognize Gloversville once famous for producing that eponymous product and anything else made of leather. This is where the author grew up, the only son of an aspirant mother and a charming, feckless father who were born into this close-knit community. But by the time of his childhood in the 1950s, prosperity was inexorably being replaced by poverty and illness (often tannery-related), with everyone barely scraping by under a very low horizon.
A world elsewhere was the dream his mother instilled in Rick, and strived for herself, and their subsequent adventures and tribulations in achieving that goal—beautifully recounted here—were to prove lifelong, as would Gloversville’s fearsome grasp on them both. Fraught with the timeless dynamic of going home again, encompassing hopes and fears and the relentless tides of familial and individual complications, this story is arresting, comic, heartbreaking, and truly beautiful, an immediate classic.
About Richard Russo
Richard Russo lives with his wife in Camden, Maine, and Boston. In 2002 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls.
Editorial Review
Fans of Russo’s fiction (That Old Cape Magic, 2009, etc.) likely know that the model for his novels’ working-class Northeast settings is Gloversville, N.Y., a factory town that fell on hard times in the 1960s. The author escaped his hometown when he went to college, but not without some company: His mother joined him as they drove to Arizona, and she’d rarely be far from him in the decades that followed. Russo describes how his life decisions were often limited by the need to accommodate his mother’s particular needs and, later, debilitating illness: One of the book’s most powerful chapters describes the author’s mother as her dementia begins to set in, fussing over a clock as if the device itself had the power to control time. (What his extended family and estranged father called “nerves” was likely a severe case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.) Though she routinely made her son’s life more difficult, this book isn’t borne out of bitterness, yet he doesn’t place his mother in soft focus either. What Russo strives to do is place his mother’s life in a social, cultural and personal context. He explores how her options were limited as a single mother in the ’60s, as a product of a manufacturing culture that collapsed before her eyes, and as a woman who needed to define herself through other men. That Russo found the time and emotional space to write novels is somewhat miraculous given her demands, but he acknowledges he couldn’t have written them without her. He inherited her sense of place as well as her compulsive personality, and this book contains much of the grace and flinty humor of his fiction. – Kirkus Reviews
Resenting And Respecting Mom In Russo’s ‘Elsewhere’
NPR Book Review – October 30, 2012 (Excerpt)
Author Richard Russo has been writing about the burned-out mill town of Gloversville, N.Y., for years. In one Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, he called it Empire Falls, Maine; in another novel, it was Thomaston, N.Y.
Now, Russo has turned his attention to the realGloversville and his experiences growing up there. His new memoir, Elsewhere, tracks his relationship with a very intense and neurotic mother who was also a gallant single mom. Russo and his mother remained close even through those transitions when children usually begin to separate from their parents, like going away to college.
Russo joins NPR’s Linda Wertheimer to discuss his relationship with his mother and how she contributed to his success as a writer. [Read the full article...]
Caring For Mom, Dreaming Of ‘Elsewhere’
NPR Book Review – November 5, 2012 (Excerpt)
Something must have been in the tap water in Gloversville, N.Y., during the 1950s when Richard Russo was growing up there — something, that is, besides the formaldehyde, chlorine, lime, lead, sulfuric acid and other toxic byproducts that the town’s tanneries leaked out daily.
But one day, a droplet of mead must have fallen into the local reservoir and Russo gulped it down, because, boy, does he have the poet’s gift. In a paragraph or even a phrase, Russo can summon up a whole world, and the world he writes most poignantly about is that of the industrial white working class.
Russo is the Bruce Springsteen of novelists; in fact, Springsteen’s latest proletarian pride anthem, “We Take Care of Our Own,” kept playing in my head as I read Russo’s latest book, the memoir Elsewhere. Russo knows what it means to take care of your own. In Elsewhere, he writes with his distinctive smarts and humor about his childhood and his still conflicted class emigration from blue-collar kid to college professor and writer. Most of all, though, Elsewhere is a gorgeously nuanced memoir about his mother and Russo’s own lifelong tour of duty spent — lovingly and exhaustedly — looking out for her. [Read the full article...]
Book review: Richard Russo’s memoir, “Elsewhere”
The Washington Post Book Review – November 12, 2012 (Excerpt)
“The writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” William Faulkner once remarked, and the phrase became good as law. A writer, he said, was “driven by demons.” If he was any good, it was because he was ruthless, willing to sacrifice whatever it took to tell his story. Forget pride, honor, decency: If a writer had to rob his mother, he wouldn’t hesitate. Literature was a maw that had to be fed.
Indeed, robbing mothers is the least of it. The best writers have been known to rob fathers and forefathers, too; sisters, cousins and aunts. They’ll burgle their own children if they have to. If there’s a novelist or memoirist in your family, you know what I mean. You’re in for identity theft. You’re taking your chances.
Even so, it’s rare for a novelist to write candidly about the real behind the imagined. About a lifetime of work and the very person who inspired it. Yet that is precisely what Richard Russo has done in his memoir, “Elsewhere.” In the first nonfiction effort of his career, he tells of the mother Faulkner said he was free to rob: the fragile and all-too-human woman who raised him. [Read the full article...]
His Mother, Himself - ‘Elsewhere,’ a Memoir by Richard Russo
The New York Times Book Review – December 7, 2012 (Excerpt)
In his poem “The Lanyard,” Billy Collins catalogs the commonplace transactions made between a mother and son: “She gave me life and milk from her breasts . . . thousands of meals . . . a breathing body and a beating heart, / strong legs, bones and teeth, / and two clear eyes to read the world.” And in exchange comes the son’s confident offering: “Here is your lanyard.”
A mother and son and their own transactions are at the center of Richard Russo’s absorbing memoir, “Elsewhere,” although as Russo (seen here from boyhood through adulthood) gets older, he is often the one giving “life,” while his mother, Jean, a complicated, needy person, takes it. Russo has made his name as a novelist, and from the start he is careful, even formal, in defining his nonfiction task: “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.” [Read the full article...]
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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings
A Novel by Wilfried F. Voss
The loss of innocence, when “painted wings and giants’ rings made ways for other toys” is the central theme of this festival of children’s dream world adventures against the harsh reality of adult life.
In his newest novel, Wilfried F. Voss delivers a unique and insightful view into a child’s world and how it relates to the harsh reality of adult life, in this case the life of Roger Wilkinson, a businessman who is haunted by childhood memories and the ultimate fear of mistreating his own children. Wilkinson is in a coma after a car accident on the Massachusetts Turnpike, and he does not respond to physical stimulation. The doctor, assuming psychological issues, describes his condition as dwelling in a dark place. Consequently, Roger’s children, Patrick and Siobhan, decide to rescue their father from the dark place and bring him to Never-Neverland, because, in their view, nobody dies in Never-Neverland.
Painted wings, childhood’s great defender, And giants’ rings are such great splendor. Keep these treasures, don’t grow old In a world of tears and full of cold. - The Faery’s Silly Song
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Painted Wings and Giants’ Rings
