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A review by stevienlcf
Elsewhere by Richard Russo
4.0
I have long been a fan of Russo’s fiction; having read his memoir, I am a fan of the man (and would nominate his wife for sainthood). Russo was raised by his divorced mother, Jean, in a bleak upstate New York town that had been a thriving manufacturing hub until men stopped wearing hats and women stopped wearing dress gloves. The place was so depressed that by 1967, when Russo graduated from high school, "you could have strafed Main Street with an automatic weapon without endangering a soul.” Russo and Jean lived in a modest house with his maternal grandparents, but Jean valued few things more than her perceived independence. Despite the fact that she couldn’t drive and depended heavily on her family for financial support “because any surprise could push us into the red,” she ferociously defended her independence. Her seeming ingratitude caused her beloved father to remark, “Whoever said beggars can’t be choosers never met your mother.”
Despite what the family referred to as Jean’s “condition,” she was a devoted mother, insuring that her son had a freshly laundered school uniform even if it meant staying up past midnight doing laundry, skipping dinners to meet with his teachers “to make sure I wasn’t just learning in school but flourishing, that I wasn’t being dismissed as an irrelevant, fatherless boy,” and instilling that “reading was not a duty but a reward.” Yet, although he was cared for, Russo felt that he was the cause of Jean’s “condition” and that her “health was in my hands.” Perhaps that is why it didn’t seem so extraordinary to Russo that when he was accepted into a college in Tuscon, Arizona, he and his mother decamped together from their decaying industrial town in a dubious vehicle known as the Gray Death. As Russo explains it, “One of the sadder truths of childhood is that children . . . are unlikely to know if something is abnormal or unnatural unless an adult tells them.” And he, being an only child, had no one to compare notes with.
Jean’s insistence that she was independent while becoming more and more dependent was a pattern that spiraled through her life with increasing intensity and fury. After a brief second marriage to a man who looked like Sam Shepherd and several failed returns to her parents’ home in Gloversville, Jean called Russo to ask “how long any human was expected to live in a cage.” As Russo straddled the life of a husband, the father of two college age daughters, a professor and an accomplished writer, he and his wife became increasingly more responsible for Jean, privately joking that they never went anywhere for longer than it took Jean’s milk bottle to turn sour. Russo ruminates that responsibility and guilt explained his willingness to jeopardize his marriage and, as the decades unspooled and his mother’s condition worsened, to refuse to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties.
After Jean’s death, Russo comes to believe that his mother suffered from OCD. He recognized that her ongoing unhappiness was a symptom of her illness, and that the same genetic traits that bedeviled her he was able to parlay into a rich and satisfying career. He muses how her one claim to fame was getting him away from the “shambling, self-satisfied, uncouth, monumentally stupid people” of their hometown; yet, likes his characters in his fictional towns, Russo has never left: “I simply created Gloversvilles in my imagination.”
Despite what the family referred to as Jean’s “condition,” she was a devoted mother, insuring that her son had a freshly laundered school uniform even if it meant staying up past midnight doing laundry, skipping dinners to meet with his teachers “to make sure I wasn’t just learning in school but flourishing, that I wasn’t being dismissed as an irrelevant, fatherless boy,” and instilling that “reading was not a duty but a reward.” Yet, although he was cared for, Russo felt that he was the cause of Jean’s “condition” and that her “health was in my hands.” Perhaps that is why it didn’t seem so extraordinary to Russo that when he was accepted into a college in Tuscon, Arizona, he and his mother decamped together from their decaying industrial town in a dubious vehicle known as the Gray Death. As Russo explains it, “One of the sadder truths of childhood is that children . . . are unlikely to know if something is abnormal or unnatural unless an adult tells them.” And he, being an only child, had no one to compare notes with.
Jean’s insistence that she was independent while becoming more and more dependent was a pattern that spiraled through her life with increasing intensity and fury. After a brief second marriage to a man who looked like Sam Shepherd and several failed returns to her parents’ home in Gloversville, Jean called Russo to ask “how long any human was expected to live in a cage.” As Russo straddled the life of a husband, the father of two college age daughters, a professor and an accomplished writer, he and his wife became increasingly more responsible for Jean, privately joking that they never went anywhere for longer than it took Jean’s milk bottle to turn sour. Russo ruminates that responsibility and guilt explained his willingness to jeopardize his marriage and, as the decades unspooled and his mother’s condition worsened, to refuse to acknowledge the primacy of other loyalties.
After Jean’s death, Russo comes to believe that his mother suffered from OCD. He recognized that her ongoing unhappiness was a symptom of her illness, and that the same genetic traits that bedeviled her he was able to parlay into a rich and satisfying career. He muses how her one claim to fame was getting him away from the “shambling, self-satisfied, uncouth, monumentally stupid people” of their hometown; yet, likes his characters in his fictional towns, Russo has never left: “I simply created Gloversvilles in my imagination.”