TRAJECTORY (2017)
By Richard Russo
Alfred A. Knopf, 243
pages.
★★★★
Readers of this blog know that I am a big fan of author
Richard Russo. They also know I am not
a fan of short fiction. This raises the question of how I’d feel about a
collection of short stories from Russo. Answer: Pretty good. Russo is such a
gifted writer that I suspect he could generate interest if he penned the
ingredients in haggis.
It certainly helps that the tales in Trajectory are closer to novellas than to conventional short
stories. There are just four spread across 243 pages, which affords Russo more
space for his characters to breathe and develop. But first, let’s muse on the
title. The hardcover dust jacket sports a single archery target set against a
wooded backdrop. The implication is that a well-drawn arrow fired toward the
target will either land in or around the bull’s-eye, but that an errant shaft
has a good chance of being lost in the forest. As any archer knows, the
slightest quiver, twitch, or loss of focus alters the outcome. Sometimes, so
does luck. These are precisely the scenarios played out in Trajectory. Complexity is layered into the narratives via protagonists
who occupy a middle position between contrasting characters whose trajectories direct
them toward success or failure.
“The Horseman” juxtaposes a smart but inhibited play-it-safe
English professor between a student caught plagiarizing, family pressure, and a
burnt-out colleague on one hand, and her imposing but misunderstood former
mentor on the other. It is one of the better looks at academic insecurity I
have ever read. To add a personal note, every professor I’ve ever respected has
felt like a fraud at some point—and it’s a fear I certainly experienced.
“Voice” follows a different scholar to Venice, where he must
confront a mistake, ageing, a resentful brother, a sad widower, and two
enigmatic women. Is there a better place to explore feeling lost than
labyrinthine Venice?
The sands of time also get a workout in the remaining
stories. “Intervention” is set amidst the wreckage of the housing market
collapse and manages to connect that debacle to deep family dynamics,
sidetracked dreams, failed expectations, and successes that feel like failures.
“Milton and Marcus” finds an unnamed writer torn between the thrill of the
chase and his own grasp on reality when Hollywood courts him as a script doctor
for a proposed blockbuster. He is appropriately anonymous as the writer is a
bit player in a game he knows he can’t win: “It’s all bullshit and you know it,
just as you know that in due course you’ll be fired, though probably not by the
people flattering you now.” He’s also caught between the demands of a prima
donna director and the memory of a deceased friend: an actor for whom he wrote
the first treatment of the script in question a decade earlier. This one comes
off as a cautionary allegory and serves as a devastating takedown of the
vacuity, amorality, airbrushed mountebanks, and flea-like attention span of
modern celebrity. But would you join the Big Dance of money, posturing, and
positioning?
Many of the things that make Russo a great writer are on
display in Trajectory: his poignancy,
his facility with stripping emotions to their core and conveying them in ways
that hit home, the manner in which he universalizes individual drama, and the
skill with which he presents pathos and pulls back before it becomes bathos.
There’s always a tinge of hope amidst the darkness in a Russo tale. Also humor,
but of the nuanced kind that makes you chuckle just before you say, “Ouch!”
Russo is like that—sort of like taking a stroll in a tranquil glade just before
a wayward arrow whizzes past your head.
Rob Weir
#richardrusso
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