{"id":1930,"date":"2026-08-09T04:12:45","date_gmt":"2026-08-09T04:12:45","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-08-09T04:12:45","modified_gmt":"2026-08-09T04:12:45","slug":"hard-luck-men-in-hardscrabble-towns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1930","title":{"rendered":"Hard-Luck Men in Hardscrabble Towns"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cI\u2019m the first <\/span>writer in the family,\u201d the novelist Richard Russo once said, \u201cbut I\u2019m not the first bullshitter in the family.\u201d That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim\u2019s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.<\/p>\n

Read more A Culture War in the Bedroom<\/a><\/p>\n

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\u201cHe would pay attention to what worked in Roadhouse A,\u201d Russo said in 2025, \u201cso that when he got to Roadhouse B, he would remember what got a laugh and what didn\u2019t, and so he would change the story.\u201d Jim would tell the same story over many days, cutting and shaping, finding the beats. \u201cThere\u2019s a word for that,\u201d Russo said. \u201cIt\u2019s called revision.\u201d<\/p>\n

Revision<\/i>, a refined term that Jim would never have used, is a staple of M.F.A. programs, such as the one his son attended at the University of Arizona. When Russo graduated in 1980, the experimental fiction of William Gass and Kurt Vonnegut was in vogue, but he much preferred the shambling shaggy-dog novels of Twain and Dickens, whose humor arose not from formal innovation but from the foibles of flawed characters (like his dad), many of them poor and unlettered (ditto). Early on, Russo threw in his lot with Tom and Huck and Jim, with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist\u2014characters whose humble beginnings offer a vantage from which to see the absurdity of an unjust world.<\/p>\n

Beginning with the 1986 publication of his first novel, Mohawk<\/i>, Russo has filled 10 novels, plus many essays and short stories, with portraits of men born with few gifts save their wits, making their way in an economy not set up to reward their kind. The bulk of his fiction is set in New York, in towns like Gloversville, where the good jobs have vanished (the glove-making trade there\u2014once responsible for 90 percent of gloves sold in America\u2014was by the 1950s already being replaced by imports). In these places, it\u2019s unclear who is slinging more bull, the semi-employed men in bars or the educated civic \u201cleaders,\u201d such as mayors and bankers, promising that good times will return.<\/p>\n

In Russo\u2019s best work, especially his classic trilogy, set in fictional North Bath\u2014Nobody\u2019s Fool<\/i> (1993), Everybody\u2019s Fool<\/i> (2016), and Somebody\u2019s Fool <\/i>(2023)\u2014his characters\u2019 banter, crude and self-knowing, reminds us that the worst effects of the modern economy are present not in the landscape but in the soulscape, the fractured lives and identities of obsolete workers. Their barroom bravado is a front, masking inner hurt, or just bewilderment. In the novelist\u2019s business of exploring what\u2019s inside people\u2019s heads\u2014the way we all think more than we can say\u2014Russo is the peer of Jonathan Franzen and Meg Wolitzer, even if his characters think in fewer syllables.<\/p>\n

At 77, Russo has published a new novel, Under the Falls<\/i>, that at first seems to be a break with his past work. The characters are young, mostly in their mid\u201130s, and the protagonist, Tyler Sinclair, is honest-to-goodness rich. After high school, he left Stone Mountain, another of Russo\u2019s fictional upstate hamlets, riding his guitar to stardom. When he blew out of town, he left behind a toxic love triangle and a paralyzed buddy, the victim of a near drowning that many blamed Tyler for. In the years since, he has milked the town, and a Mellencamp-like image as a boy from the sticks, for songwriting material. Now Tyler has come back to a place he never wanted to see again. Stone Mountain\u2019s denizens feel the same way about him. At his much-ballyhooed return show, he and his band are pelted with eggs. On the way out of town, the band\u2019s limousine is mysteriously driven off the road, and during his convalescence in Stone Mountain, Tyler gets caught up in local intrigue involving dope dealing, manslaughter, and police corruption.<\/p>\n

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Under the Falls: A Novel<\/div>\n
By Richard Russo<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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