New York, Maine, or . . . Mississippi?

Speaking of Richard Russo’s new novel, Bridge of Sighs, it’s set in New York, where Russo grew up. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls was set in Maine, where Russo now lives. After the publication of Empire Falls, I interviewed Russo about his settings . . .

I ask Richard Russo—one outsider to another—if he considers himself a Maine writer. We’re sitting comfortably on his second-story veranda overlooking Camden’s main drag. It’s a sweaty Tuesday afternoon, but the tourists are noisy and legion, rumbling by on their search for the coast.

“Mainers, by and large, are very territorial,” the New York native begins cautiously, “and you felt that right away coming from outside. And I did, too. And yeah, I remember someone wrote some scathing piece about Cathie Pelletier, who’s a friend of mine and wrote half a dozen great novels about the County [Aroostook County], but then she sinned. She moved away.”

Russo uncrosses his legs and takes a sip from his iced tea. “There are two things that you can do to alienate the territorial Maine writers,” he continues, this time a bit less cautiously. “You can leave, right, which is a sin. Or you can interlope. You can be a writer from somewhere else and then come in and write as if you’re a Mainer, when everyone knows full well that you are from away.”

Which, while not exactly answering my question, is true. Native Mainer Sanford Phippen has complained prominently, regularly and sometimes bitterly that Maine literature “suffers from a surfeit of superficial views from without.” In his essay, “Missing from the Books: My Maine,” he tells of his luckless search, within the pages of so much written about the state, for “the Maine I grew up in; the Maine I both love and hate; the Maine that is in my blood and ancestry and will haunt me always.” Instead, he claims to find too often the shufflin’ Downeast yokel, whom he calls “the Maine Native as Nigger.”

But for Phippen, what’s most important is not the divide between natives and Massholes but—and here one can imagine Carolyn Chute firing off a few rounds in agreement—between the rich and the poor. Or, more specifically, between those who can afford to leave and those who can’t. When dealing with folks from away, Phippen writes, there is always the hovering knowledge “that as a Maine person one may not have as much money or have traveled as widely.” And presumably that same self-consciousness can be turned on your native neighbors. In other words, you can write about Phippen’s “subterranean, unreported life”—as Pelletier did so wonderfully in The Funeral Makers 15 years ago—but you can’t leave. You can’t betray a Mainer’s “fierce pride.”

[snip]

The irony is that, for all intents and purposes, Empire Falls could be the upstate New York town of Mohawk or any of the other fictional “away” locations that Russo has written about in such novels as The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool and Straight Man. I ask him if the settings are interchangeable.

“I think it probably is, if not exactly interchangeable—I mean, I write more about class than I do about place,” he says. “It’s funny, when you write about class, people always think you’re writing about place for some reason.” According to Russo, however, his Mohawk and North Bath and Railton, Pa., and Empire Falls, Maine, are the same, give or take the Bean boots. They are all populated by regular folk “who do blue-collar jobs and belong to a certain class in terms of what job they do and the amount of money they make and the amount of education they have. Those things are constant in all of the books.”

He leans forward. “And I often have people come up to me and say, ‘Boy, that town you wrote about—’ whether they’re talking about The Risk Pool or Nobody’s Fool, they say, ‘Boy, that town you wrote about, you just got it nailed. That is my hometown.’ And I’ll say, where you from? And they’ll say Mississippi.”

IMAGE: Abandoned Factory, Tampa, Florida, by Thamer Altassan