Whore's Child and Other Stories Book

Richard Russo, once a teacher of writing himself, opens his debut collection of short stories, The Whore's Child, in familiar territory: the classroom. Sister Ursula, who is "nearly as big as a linebacker," deposits herself in the narrator's advanced writing workshop, uninvited and unregistered. Despite the professor's insistence that she write fiction -- "In this class we actually prefer a well-told lie," he tells her -- she submits for the class's consideration several hefty installments of rock-pure memoir.


She patted my hand, as you might the hand of a child. "Never you mind," she then assured me, adjusting her wimple for the journey home. "My whole life has been a lie."

"I'm sure you don't mean that," I told her.


But of course she did. Sister Ursula is constitutionally incapable of writing what is not true. On the other hand, she is equally incapable of seeing clearly what she writes'and this is what provides Russo's story, if not the nun's, the thrum of good fiction.

In a post-modern and un-Russo-like twist, "The Whore's Child" is both the perfect short story and the blueprint for such a story. As the professor summarizes Sister Ursula's bitter and lonely take (he provides only her knife-edged first lines, like "It was my hatred that drew me deeper into the Church"), we also hear the class's response. It is in this unlikely arena, marked by PC angst and academic jargon, that Sister Ursula discovers a secret she has been hiding from herself her entire life.

Sister Ursula, we come to understand, is the ideal practitioner of the "well-told lie."

Russo's regular beat, it should be said, is men, not nuns, sons, not sisters. Through five fat, summer-perfect novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls, the author has explored, with wonderful humor and pathos, that great American, impotent male. From the down-and-out Sully in Nobody's Fool to the hapless but good-hearted Miles in Empire Falls, Russo's protagonists are mere skeletons of the 1950s ideal they were weaned on. Where their fathers lived in an age of straightforward, powerful men, they have reached middle age in a time of ironic self-contempt.

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