Richard Russo, prize-winning author of eight novels, almost gave up on the idea of being a writer before he’d barely started. When he was a PhD student at the University of Arizona his fiction tutor, Robert Downs, told him that most writers have about 1,000 pages of bad prose to expel before they can hope to write seriously. “In your case,” he added, “make it two thousand.” I presume this teacher was nicknamed Put-Downs. Russo had a talented classmate – David – who would get an A from Downs, the only one in the class. David went on to publish poetry, teach at college, have a family and a problem with alcohol – and in 2002 got a shock on discovering that his unpromising friend of 40 years ago, Rick Russo, had just won the Pulitzer prize for fiction.
Why does life turn out the way it does? Russo can’t fathom it, but he knows this much: “Writing, like life itself, is difficult. Many truly talented people give up every day.” He stuck at it, though, against his teacher’s discouragement, and that might be crucial too. Russo’s wry self-deprecation is the keynote of his writing. It comes through in the best and longest essay in this book, Getting Good, part-memoir, part-defence of talent and practice – of talent through practice. He instances his maternal grandfather, a glove cutter whose skill was honed by joining a guild, apprenticing himself to craftsmen for two years and acquiring their knowhow. Art is subject to chance and demands a certain intuition in creating it, whether you’re wielding “a paintbrush or a camera or a pen”. But you have to put in the time in the first place. He quotes Malcolm Gladwell’s “ten-thousand-hour rule”, famously applied to the Beatles and their gruelling early routine of playing seven nights a week in Hamburg. By the time they returned to Liverpool they weren’t just technically accomplished: they had laid the ground for world domination.
Russo had rock star dreams, too, he could play and sing “okay”, and even developed a small following at a Tucson restaurant, “where I gradually, reluctantly and finally acknowledged the gap between my desire and my talent”. He could have got better, he thinks, “just nowhere near good enough”. Bruce Springsteen could breathe easy. But it probably never stopped Russo from wishing.
Destiny rears up again in an extraordinary piece about an old friend and fellow novelist, Jim, who became, through gender-reassignment surgery, Jenny. Keeping vigil at his friend’s hospital bedside Russo traces his shock at the news: if Jim’s wife had never suspected the truth of what her husband had felt all his life – namely, that she had always been a woman – “then what in the whole wide world was truly knowable?” His struggle to understand his friend’s decision, partly through immersion in “cautionary parables of transformation”, becomes quite moving, despite the lame, deeply non-woke joke he makes of the surgery. He repeats it in another essay about comedy, which argues that writers don’t need to make the world hilarious, because it already is. It’s just that some people have a reliable funny bone, and some don’t. All the same, I’m not sure that even a comic novelist as accomplished as Russo should try to dissect humour like this, surgeon-style – it always dies on the table.
He is much better at illuminating the craft of writing and the practitioners he admires. Mark Twain’s voice he reckons a national treasure. It has “become so much a part of us that it’s hard to remember there was ever a time when there was simply nothing like it”. He offers useful tips in his essay on the narrative advantages of “omniscience”, and a surprising theory on that near-sacred text of American literature The Great Gatsby. Filtering the story through Nick Carraway’s limited perspective, he argues, is “far from ideal” and may have caused F Scott Fitzgerald to rue it as a mechanism for releasing information. You may hear the howls of a million dissenters not far off.
The Destiny Thief, for all its entertainment, feels cobbled together. His 2004 address to the graduates of Colby College, who included his daughter Kate, was possibly a treat for its audience at the time but in print sounds bogusly “down home” and too fond of its own geniality. Also, don’t advise anyone – especially a young person – to have kids on the grounds that “you won’t be a fully vested citizen until you have someone you love more than life to hand this imperfect world over to”. For both sentiment and sentence construction that gets an F.
Read Russo instead for his wisdom on the writing life, and on the self-doubt that nibbles away at it. Most of the stuff an aspiring writer needs to learn, “about point of view and plotting and character development and dialogue”, can be learned, somehow. Unfortunately, he adds, “what can’t be taught is absolutely indispensable”.
• The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writers, Writing and Life is published by Allen & Unwin. To order a copy for £16.71 (RRP £18.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
