Richard Russo is one of the best American writers of today, and I thoroughly enjoyed his collection of short stories titled The Whore’s Child until I got to the disastrous last story. This happens to be the collection’s longest story as well, and it manages to overshadow the great impression left by the preceding truly great stories.
There are plot lines that you should not touch unless you are very sure you have something new and unexpected to contribute. The world of cynical adults as seen through the eyes of an innocent child is such a story line. It’s been done to death, and it only makes sense to disinter it if you know you can do what Ian McEwan did in his masterpiece Atonement.
Not only is the innocent boy in Russo’s failure of a story so cloyingly sweet that I think I’m getting a toothache, the obnoxious little tyke also plays baseball in excruciating and incomprehensible detail. At first, he is bad at it and feels self-conscious. But at the end of the story, he delivers the winning – whatever it is that winners in baseball deliver – and his coach is very proud. Yawn McYawnski to the rescue.
And it’s such a shame that this one story is so horrible because the rest are very good and they helped me see Russo in an unexpected way. But I don’t want to talk about it because I’m still traumatized by the badness of the innocent baseball-playing boy story.
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