The Destiny Thief

October 30, 2017
In his first essay collection, Russo (Everybody’s Fool) rambles leisurely through a broad range of topics with his characteristically amiable voice. In a commencement speech to the 2004 graduating class of Colby College, where he then taught, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist offers “Russo’s Rules for a Good Life,” such as “search out the kind of work you’d gladly do for free and then get somebody to pay you for it.” In the most poignant essay, “Imagining Jenny,” Russo powerfully portrays the physical difficulties endured by a friend during gender-reassignment surgery. Elsewhere, in “The Gravestone and the Commode,” Russo brilliantly uses the incongruity of an old gravestone sitting next to an apple tree in his backyard, marking no apparent grave, to illustrate life’s inherent absurdity, as a consequence of which the writer has “no need to make the world a funny place.” In the longest selection, “Getting Good,” Russo artfully meanders from his early abortive attempts to become a rock musician to his successful writing career, concluding that any artist hungering for success must “put in the time because genius isn’t nearly enough.” Russo’s colorful book offers his novel’s fans more of his dazzling and moving writing, often revealing glimpses of the forces that drive a bestselling fiction writer. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

December 1, 2017

Russo has won big sales and big awards for his fiction, short stories, and memoirs, but he hasn't turned out an essay collection until now. Here he ranges from the understanding he gleaned about humor in art and life from seeing an out-of-place toilet to his efforts to help a friend through gender-reassignment surgery.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2018
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author takes a break from fiction.After three decades and a dozen works of fiction, Russo (Trajectory, 2017, etc.) offers up this splendid collection of essays. Some were previously published, and one was spoken: a charming commencement speech highlighting "Russo's Rules for a Good Life." These are wise, personal pieces, and readers get to know the author as a comforting, funny, and welcoming guy. These admirable qualities are most prevalent in "Imagining Jenny," published as an afterword to Jennifer Finney Boylan's popular 2003 memoir, She's Not There, about her sex reassignment surgery. Jim Boylan was Russo's close friend and a fellow college professor at Colby. At first, writes the author, "I missed my old pal Jim and wanted him...back again." But he came to understand and appreciate what his friend was going through, and he creates a tender, affectionate, "great love story." The rest of the essays focus on writers. Russo expertly resuscitates Dickens' Pickwick Papers for new readers as he explores "the spectacle of genius recognizing itself." He's also insightful about Twain's nonfiction, which offered up new opportunities for the "inspired, indeed unparalleled, bullshitter" who later became the "compassionate, broad-minded and fatherly" author of Huckleberry Finn. Along the way, we learn about some of Russo's other favorite writers, including Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, and Flannery O'Connor, and musicians: Springsteen, Dylan, Grace Slick. The longest piece, "Getting Good," is a pep talk about the road the author took to become a successful writer, while the title essay argues for writers going home again in order to find the right tone for their writing. "The Gravestone and the Commode" is a riff on the importance of humor in life and literature: "The best humor has always resided in the chamber next to the one occupied by suffering."The only weakness with this book is the length. Please, sir, may we have some more?

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