Reading Richard Russo. I love him and I hate him. I love the guy so much I read everything he writes. I hate the guy because in doing so I am reminded just how pathetic my writing is by comparison. I discovered him a few years ago when I found his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Empire Falls, in a bookstore in Camden on the Maine Authors aisle. When I then learned that he used to live a block from the Camden Deli and actually spent time writing the book at his regular table there, I was enchanted. Seven novels later, here I am, diving once again into two of his more recent works...
Great writers have the gift of delivering truth directly into your brain without the distractions of car chases, bad acting, and the pretentious cinematography of film. You’re reading along on the edge of your seat when, out of nowhere, you are presented with a fog clearing sentence like this:
...People cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom.
It stops you in your tracts. You find yourself staring out at the lake, deep in thought, sorting through all of the real life examples of this human tendency you have witnessed in your 61 years, how many times we deny evidence of our own errors rather than admit them, learn from them and move on. How many marriages have failed, how many businesses have gone belly up, how much of our own politics has been poisoned by this simple truth?
But then it dawns on me that this isn’t a unique insight by a great writer, I have heard something similar before, but I just can’t place it. Maybe it was from Shakespeare or one of the great works of Dickens, or Jane Austin. Then it hits me...it was actually from the Apostle Paul:
...They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped created things rather than the creator...Romans 1:25
...proving another 2500 year old truth bomb from King Solomon...There is nothing new under the sun.
Lest I give the impression that Russo’s writing is all deadly serious, I should mention that he is perhaps the funniest novelist of this or any age. More often than not, his humor comes on the heels of something deadly serious, which makes it even funnier. When he was describing a character’s deadly diagnosis of cancer and the blow it had been to his young son, he follows it up with the sick man’s opinion of hospitals...
...Never let the bastards take your pants, because bare-assed men don’t get to make decisions.
Truer words have never been spoken.
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