Memorable Tales About Everyday Life, Ordinary People

THE WHORE’S CHILD

And Other Stories

by Richard Russo

Alfred A. Knopf

272 pp., $24

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Starting in 1986 with “Mohawk,” set in upstate New York, Richard Russo has made a name for himself writing big novels about small places. His most recent, “Empire Falls,” about a dying mill town in Maine, won him the Pulitzer Prize earlier this year.

Neither a satirist--like Sinclair Lewis--nor an idealizer--like Thornton Wilder--Russo plumbs the depths and shallows of small-town existence, exploring the circumscribed, sometimes bleak lives of his characters with sharp insight, wry wit and unsentimental compassion.

These same gifts are evident in his short fiction as well. In moving from his customary large canvas, thick with characters, plots and subplots, to the more constricted form of the short story, Russo certainly lands on his feet.

The seven stories in his first collection, “The Whore’s Child and Other Stories,” are likely to please his fans and win him new readers.

Some of the stories are perhaps a little too neat, a problem that plagues the genre in general. Others incline toward the thin and flat--another hazard of this mode. But each of these stories succeeds--in one way or another--in capturing and holding our attention, and several do more than that.

Who is the eponymous “whore’s child” of the title story? She is, of all things, Sister Ursula, an elderly Belgian nun who pretty much crashes the advanced creative-writing course that the narrator teaches.

The narrator tries to discourage her, telling her that her lack of experience as a writer will put her at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the other students.

“This is a storytelling class, Sister,” he adds. “We’re all liars here.... In this class, we actually prefer a well-told lie.”

“Never you mind,” replies Sister Ursula. “My whole life has been a lie.”

The long story that Sister Ursula proceeds to produce in several installments strikes the teacher and most of the class as unadorned nonfiction.

“In the convent,” it begins, “I was known as the whore’s child.”

“ ‘Nice opening,’ ” the narrator tells us he penciled in the margin, “as if to imply that her choice had been a purely artistic one. It wasn’t, of course.”

This nun’s story simply reflects the facts of her life: She was placed in a convent as a little girl and her mother was a prostitute. She proceeds to recount the prejudice, injustice, mistreatment and mean-spiritedness she encountered as a child in the convent.

“ ‘It’s a victim story,’ one student recognize[s]. ‘The character is being acted on by outside forces, but she has no choices, which means there can be no consequences to anything she does. If she doesn’t participate in her own destiny, where’s the story?’ ” demands the student, who also admits to liking it nonetheless.

In “The Whore’s Child,” Russo poses--and plays with--what seems to be an increasingly relevant question about the relative merits of two literary modes.

Which exerts the stronger appeal: the art of the fiction writer or the true story of an actual life?

Russo takes a trenchant, child’s-eye look at the dysfunctional 1970s family in two memorable stories. In “Joy Ride,” a 12-year-old boy is dragged across the country by his mother, who has impulsively decided to leave her perfectly nice, if dull, husband to seek freedom and excitement on the open road. The trip exposes facets of her character that her son is never able to forget--or forgive.

Marital discord is also central to “The Mysteries of Linwood Hart,” whose young hero is one of Russo’s most fetching fictional creations:

“It felt, sometimes, as if the world must’ve been patiently waiting for him to get born so that real things could start happening--kind of like the difference between the drills at school and an actual fire. He knew that things could and did happen even if he wasn’t there, but he still had the impression that the truly important events tended to occur only when he was there to witness them.... Surely life played that fair, at least.

“The world was there for him to learn from and learn about. Otherwise, what was the point?”

But the world, Linwood learns, is not quite as considerate and child-centered a place as he had assumed.

The narrator of “Poison” (one of Russo’s weaker efforts) is a middle-aged writer: professionally successful, happily married, reasonably content. A visit from his old friend Gene, a writer with the same working-class background, stirs up memories of the past, anxiety about the future and guilt over the failure to live up to ideals.

Learning to see beyond the limitations of one’s own personal viewpoint is a recurrent theme for Russo.

In “Monhegan Light,” a widower gets a fresh, if too late, perspective on the woman he married from a portrait painted by her lover.

In “Buoyancy,” a middle-aged academic worried about his wife, who is recovering from a mental breakdown, suddenly finds himself the one who is feeling disoriented.

Having recently undergone treatment for cancer, the 52-year-old narrator of “The Farther You Go” is understandably annoyed at being urged by his wife to intervene in their daughter’s troubled marriage. But in doing so, he gains new insights into his daughter, his son-in-law and his own marriage.

Like Richard Ford, Russo is a writer who prefers to focus on the ordinary and the commonplace rather than the bizarre and the outlandish. His style and approach are similarly understated, calling attention not to themselves, but to the world they depict so effectively and affectingly.