Unmistakable voice of Richard Russo shines through in new story collection
When novelists branch out for some Hollywood moonlighting, they often feel compelled to use their experiences to create a “Hollywood novel,” usually a slam against all the slime. Richard Russo has just contributed his observations to the La-La Land library with a novella, “Milton and Marcus” — it’s his version of “Get Shorty,” only nobody gets murdered.
It’s one of four stories in a collection called “Trajectory.” All are nice additions to the Russo oeuvre, but “Milton and Marcus” is the most fun and the only one with a Hollywood connection. It’s fiction, though readers with any knowledge of cinema history won’t have trouble deducing which movie icons were the inspiration for two of the key characters, both leading men, one who’s passed on, the other still working but aging. The fictional stars made two or three great films together, yet their friendship became strained. The narrator of “Milton and Marcus” is, you guessed it, a novelist who needs some money, and he’s trying to figure out whether doing a screenplay for the aging star is worth the aggravation of working for Hollywood again. The dead star is still on the novelist’s mind as the text goes back and forth between the story itself and the opening scenes of the screenplay. And yes, it would make a good movie.
There are some predictable points in “Milton and Marcus” about showbiz, the backstabbing, the insincerity and the way a once normal person loses touch with reality if he becomes a screen legend. The narrator has a fresher viewpoint, however, of a novelist’s blemishes. “I was a writer, after all, and as such I possessed the same basic skill set as actors — an insight into what makes people tick, that and a certain cynical understanding that what makes them tick generally isn’t what makes them good or even interesting. If actors are famously narcissistic, writers run a close second, and they generally have far less justification.”
The other three stories are about people with no fame but plenty of interesting complications. One is a real estate agent who’s about to make a life-and-death decision in “Intervention.” Like many Russo characters, he retains cautious hope even if those around him have questionable judgment. “People cling to folly as if it were their most prized possession, defending it, sometimes with violence, against the possibility of wisdom.”
Two tales are about professors, an occupation well known to Russo, who taught at several colleges as he sharpened his storytelling skills. In “Horseman,” a young man is caught plagiarizing in an assignment, and the incident makes the student’s professor question the choices she’s made over the years. Her faculty career has been spotless, yet she wonders if her troubled private life has been all that original. If that sounds like academic navel-gazing, be assured that Russo makes it intriguing and universal.
The other is “Voice,” in which a retired professor whose career wasn’t quite spotless finds it’s not too late, even in his 60s, even with a lifetime of selfdoubts, to find a chance for contentment — or maybe it’s just that someone tells him “things aren’t nearly as bad as they appear.”
Some Russo fans will miss the blue-collar heroes who populate the best of his novels, such as “Nobody’s Fool” and “The Risk Pool,” which describe working-class lives with straight-on honesty and an absence of condescension. Others may miss the drop-the-book laughs you can experience from reading his university satire, “Straight Man.” But they’ll enjoy the stories in “Trajectory,” and Russo newcomers will begin to scope out why he’s a Pulitzer Prize winner.