Richard Russo: The Whore's Child and other stories

By PENELOPE BIEDER

The seven short stories in this collection further establish Russo as an original new North American voice - "new" because he only shot to international prominence this year with his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls. But he has been writing for some years - Empire Falls is his fifth novel and he has written two screenplays as well.

If the writer in a story called Poison most closely resembles Russo himself, and I like to imagine that he does, then he is in his fifties, a charming, shy, quietly observant and thoughtful man living in Camden in Maine with his wife and two daughters (wasn't that the village where they shot the award-winning film In the Bedroom?).

Anyway, this collection of stories is the work of someone with not only an engaging, original gift for storytelling but also huge compassion for his fellow creatures, whether it is the 10-year-old struggling with his baseball game while his parents' marriage disintegrates around his ears, or the retired English professor bewildered by the cruelties of old age while on holiday at a hurricane-ravaged resort.

All seven stories are different from each other, and each is refreshing in its own right.

The title story is about a retired nun who joins a creative writing class and rivets it with a story of unparalleled nastiness and cruelty.

Monhegan Light could be seen as a tale of almost unrequited love - within a marriage. And Joy Ride is a stylish road story about a mother's mid-life crisis. The hidden issue of domestic violence is delicately played out in The Farther You Go, and in Poison the worst sort of environmental pollution blights two generations.

What links the stories is the superb, understated writing. A subplot may loom but the reader has enough confidence to know that Russo will return to the main yarn to tie up any loose ends. He produces a series of tours de force without showing off - these stories are both earth-shattering and peculiarly modest.

He gives his characters room to breathe as they wrestle with home truths, and his depiction of a family from a child's point of view in the final story, The Mysteries of Linwood Hart, is painful in its accuracy, and utterly rewarding to read. But then, every story is a gem.

Random House

$34.95