Elsewhere, by Richard Russo

The vagaries of when reserved books show up brought me a second “son’s-memoir-of-mom” within a week.  Unlike Will Schwalbe’s accomplished mother, however, Richard Russo’s mother, Jean, struggles throughout her long life.  Russo, from a young age, is her prop.  After her gambler husband left the family, they moved into her parents’ duplex in Gloverville, NY, the blue-collar tannery town where Russo grows up.  Although Jean has a decent job in at GE in nearby Schenectady, she doesn’t have a car and has never learned to drive.  Throughout the book, a major theme is her pride in “always living independently,” when in truth, she leans upon her parents, her son, and to a certain extent, “the kindness of strangers,” to maintain this fiction.  Russo doesn’t sugar-coat the emotional and financial difficulties of being her main support, and the real hardships it causes him and his wife and daughters until her death.  His relationship with his mother, and the dying town of Gloverville (whose occupants are also dying of the diseases caused by the industry that was its economic engine), has clearly shaped his life and are reflected in many of his successful novels.   It was, for me, a difficult book to read.  Can you imagine this:  your mother urges you to apply to college in distant Arizona rather than the perfectly adequate nearby SUNY branch, and then it becomes clear why – she’s coming with you!  It is her attempt to escape Gloverville and is, of course, a dismal and devastating failure, nearly bringing him down with her.   His love for his mother and his frustration with her constant demands for his attention are at war within him throughout the book.  Only after her death is he able to recognize what diagnosable mental problems she must have had and how this untreated illness lead to her rather sad life.  246 pp.