Tag: Richard Russo

“I expect you to beat the odds. That’s my gift to you, in fact, that gift of expectations.”

At the end of this novel, Peter Sullivan tells the hard-scrabble students in his English class that he believes in them and expects them to succeed, even if no one else has ever had faith in them before. What a wonderful gift! In fact, in the closing pages, we … Read More

“It’s one thing to know a lot and to have experienced a lot, but it’s quite another to know how you feel about what you’ve observed and lived.”

We can’t assume that all novelists who create likable characters are likable themselves, but I imagine that Richard Russo is. In this collection of essays, he is warm, funny, and self-deprecating – traits that characterize many of the people in his novels. For example, he tells us about the classmate … Read More

“Wasn’t memory, that bully and oppressor, supposed to become soft and spongy?”

What if you found out that many of your memories were either wrong or incomplete? Maybe you would have the same disconcerted feeling that I had when I first saw the cover of this book.  It’s a picture of someone diving head-first into a large body of water – but … Read More

Five Best Novels of 2016

The five novels that rose to the top of my 2016 list are:

The best word to describe Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton is exquisite. What I love about Strout is her ability to dive right in to the heat of the moment without engaging in melodrama or … Read More

“Why couldn’t she be more like his other teachers, who looked at him blankly the following fall when he said hello to them outside Woolworths, having in a matter of months forgotten his existence entirely?”

russoNo contemporary writer is better at convincing the reader that a person with many faults can be a hero than Richard Russo.  His mixture of empathy, honesty, warmth and wit made Sully a heroic figure in Nobody’s Fool and makes Doug Raymer the equally-unlikely hero in the sequel Everyone’s … Read More