Went to the New York State Writers Institute’s shebang with Richard Russo on his new novel. Proud of finding my way directly through the labyrinthine State University campus, to the venue. Then the foresight to buy the book before heading into the packed auditorium. And afterward, making a bee-line to get an early spot in the book signing queue — first hitting the refreshments table to grab a brownie and cookie to munch while waiting.
The woman ahead of me took me for a professor. I get that all the time, I guess I really look the part. She also thought I must be somebody because I was saying hello to so many people there.
One was Bill Kennedy. Another was Casey Seiler (editor of Albany’s Times-Union) who, emceeing the program, noted that the only two Pulitzer winners in literature from our area were both present: Kennedy and Russo. Kennedy said I was looking good. I returned the compliment — and pointed out that he’s twenty years my senior. Amazing how at 95 he still shows up for all these events. I’d even encountered him at a little local art thing a few months back.
Russo’s new novel is Somebody’s Fool — completing a trilogy with Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool. (I’ve written about the latter, and handed him a printout when he signed my book.) It’s challenging to write a sequel when the dominating central character is already dead. But Sully is still much of a presence, and the other characters are pretty vivid.
Book reviews require at least one critical word. Here, people are always “sliding” into seats or onto barstools. Always. C’mon, man, change it up a little. Reminded me of a novel I once read where drinks were only ever “knocked back.”
Russo said the trilogy’s trajectory is increasingly dark. Though the endings here are anything but. He also stressed that most of the characters are basically the kind of working class people who he didn’t think get much of a role in today’s American literature.
Their lives are tough. Another big point Russo made was that successful people tend to ascribe their success to personal qualities and decisions, rather than sheer blind luck — which is often a truer story. I’ve often reflected similarly. One could chalk up my own nice life to sterling character traits and good choices. Yet I’m acutely cognizant of luck’s role.
Example: in 1970, with no job in prospect, I had to make one last visit to my law school’s administrative office, and happened to spot a little card tacked to a bulletin board — “NY Public Service Commission seeking attorneys.”
It gives me the willies to ponder how my life might otherwise have unfolded.
And even if I did benefit from sterling character traits, having them was luck. I wasn’t born with some predestined deservingness. People with lousy lives associated with personal defects may be faulted, but having those defects in the first place is bad luck.
It’s an issue much to the fore in Everybody’s Fool. Here we have a lot of characters, messed up in various ways, through bad choices and behaviors, with corresponding personality quirks. All bad luck, one might say. Yet humanly speaking, it’s hard to avoid being at least somewhat judgmental. Surely some of these people, despite everything, could have made better choices and decisions.
Take Janey. Having survived marriage to a violent psycho, you might think she’d re-evaluate her viewpoint on men. Of course she doesn’t (well, not till the end). This is an aspect of human psychology that’s always particularly baffled me: women’s attraction to “bad boys.” Like moths to a flame. Perhaps explicable in evolutionary terms. But still. It seems so dysfunctionally self-destructive. Maybe it so rankles me because I was always the nice guy and had such difficulty getting girls.
Well, except for that one time, when I thoughtlessly lapsed and acted like a bad boy — which finally got me a girl.
Leading to a decade of heartache. So, bad luck? No — setting me up for the bigger good luck that followed.