BOOK REVIEW: ‘The Destiny Thief’ by Richard Russo

OPINION:

THE DESTINY THIEF: ESSAYS ON WRITING, WRITERS AND LIFE

By Richard Russo

Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95, 224 pages

We are into the summer reading season: the time when we choose books to take to the beach or the lake, or to while away the misery of planes and airports. Publishers see this as a chance to promote feel-pretty-good family sagas or romances, or mysteries that nudge the inner detective rather than threaten anything more serious.

But why fiction? Why not a bunch of essays? They are shorter than novels, so reading can be fitted in around other vacation exploits, and they’re just as good as novels at prompting warm-weather musings. Richard Russo’s “The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life” is a good candidate.

The author has written eight novels and a number of screenplays, and before that he was a college professor. In English departments today that means you teach lots of writing, and in his case that includes both the freshman comp classes of his early work life and Master of Fine Arts classes when he was a published novelist, so he’s well-equipped to discuss writing and writers.

And he has much to say of interest. His essays on Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” and on Mark Twain’s nonfiction are so appreciative and astute that readers could well be induced to add these books to the summer reading list. Nonetheless, the author’s selection of events from his own experience as a writer and teacher makes even more compelling reading.

The title essay records his first writing class. He was a grad student at the University of Arizona, working on a dissertation on Charles Brockden Brown, when he felt the call to a writing workshop. A classmate he calls David was the star student. The teacher thought David was a talented writer who really wanted to write, while he judged Richard Russo as a ho-hum writer who really wanted to teach college.

Fast forward to 2002. Now David is a college teacher who has had some success as a poet, while Mr. Russo has just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Empire Falls.” In effect, their destinies have switched.

“At the risk of sounding falsely modest,” the author writes, “I am not aware of anyone — teacher, family member, friend — who predicted anything like the great good fortune that has befallen me in the writing career that I came to fairly late.” He cites a former girlfriend who said “I never dreamed you had books in you.”

So why has he been successful? Mr. Russo explains his early life in upstate New York — more thoroughly presented in his memoir “Elsewhere.” He reviews his work in workshops, his early college teaching jobs, his need to make a living, and his first attempts, largely unsuccessful, to publish stories and novels.

Finally, he decided to abandon writing, but before doing so “to give my full attention to the kind of people whose lives were, at least to me, both important and essential.” In other words, the working class he grew up among in New York state. The result was his first novel “Mohawk.” But, as he notes “there’s no dead reckoning.”

True. Technique, however, is more than helpful. In other essays he explores the development of skills. “The Gravestone and the Commode” describes cultivating the eye and ear of a comic novelist. In “Getting Good” he writes about voice — a vital characteristic according to literary critics, but he notes that some authors manage quite well without a distinctive one.

Rather, he insists, all writers need peace — “to live and work as if you had all the time in the world, knowing full well you don’t.” As for point of view — the question about where in relation to the story the narrator stands — he makes a vigorous and compelling case for omniscience in “What Frogs Think: A Defense of Omniscience.”

“Imagining Jenny” is not directly about writing, but about the experience of supporting a close friend — like himself a happily married writer and college teacher — during gender reassignment surgery. Melanie, who has also had reassignment surgery, shares Jenny’s hospital room, but lacks Jenny’s emotional and financial support, and has many post-operative problems.

Will she make it? The situation recalls that in “The Destiny Thief.” Why is gender reassignment essential for Melanie and Jenny? Why is Jenny’s outcome better than Melanie’s? Destiny again. And again, as in “The Destiny Thief,” Richard Russo structures contrasting experiences of apparently similar people.

Most of us don’t write successful novels and screenplays, or need to have our bodies adapted to reflect our gender, so one appeal of these essays is that the curious can learn about radically different lives.

Richard Russo encourages readers to think about intersections of work and luck, place and time, what we anticipate and what transpires. He does so entertainingly, getting his essays off to a fast start with vivid openings and proceeding with speed, usually with lots of incident and, eventually, commentary. Plenty of humor, too. Spending some vacation time with their inquisitive author is definitely worth a shot.

• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.