{"id":196166,"date":"2026-06-28T06:58:55","date_gmt":"2026-06-28T14:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196166"},"modified":"2026-06-28T08:23:32","modified_gmt":"2026-06-28T16:23:32","slug":"forgiveness-without-sentiment-the-fiction-of-richard-russo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=196166","title":{"rendered":"Forgiveness Without Sentiment: The Fiction of Richard Russo"},"content":{"rendered":"

Richard Russo<\/a> (b. July 15, 1949) stands among the leading American novelists of working-class life and small-town decline. His fiction tracks the inner lives of ordinary people caught between economic stagnation, family obligation, and the receding promise of postwar America. Critics often file him under comic writers, yet his humor rarely exists for its own sake. Humor lets his characters keep their footing as they face disappointment, failed ambition, and the slow hollowing of towns that once held industrial life. He joins social realism to psychological insight, and the combination has made him the foremost portraitist of the blue-collar Northeast since the generation of Bernard Malamud<\/a> (1914-1986), John Updike<\/a> (1932-2009), and John Cheever<\/a> (1912-1982).<\/p>\n

Russo was born in Johnstown, New York<\/a>, and grew up in nearby Gloversville<\/a>, a glove-manufacturing town whose fortunes collapsed during his childhood. The decline of the leather-tanning trade marked his imagination for good. The smell of the tanneries, the polluted creeks, the shuttered factories, and the thinning neighborhoods entered the physical landscape that returns in novels such as Mohawk and Empire Falls<\/a>. His grandfather worked in the tanning trade, which gave Russo a direct line to the laboring world he would spend a career depicting. His mother, Jean, raised him for the most part after his parents’ troubled marriage ended, and he learned early the financial fear, the pride, and the tangled feeling that run through his fiction. His father moved in and out of his life and became the model for a recurring Russo man: charming, quick, and unreliable, a figure whose failures sound across generations.<\/p>\n

Education gave Russo his exit from the limits of his hometown. At the University of Arizona<\/a> he began in geography before he turned to English literature, and he earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees there. The early pull toward geography anticipated one of the strengths of his fiction. Few living novelists hold so sharp a sense of place, or watch so closely how streets, rivers, factories, and hills shape the relations among people in a town. His dissertation examined the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown<\/a> (1771-1810), an early sign of his interest in the meeting of psychology and narrative. After graduate school he taught at Southern Illinois University<\/a>, then joined the faculty at Colby College<\/a> in Maine. In 1996 he left teaching to write full time.<\/p>\n

His first novel, Mohawk (1986), set down the features of his literary world at once. In a declining upstate New York town, families struggle against decay while they stay loyal to the communities that formed them. Russo does not romanticize blue-collar America. He presents it as nurturing and suffocating at the same time, a home people dream of leaving while they remain bound to it.<\/p>\n

The Risk Pool (1988) deepened these concerns through Ned Hall and his charming, irresponsible father. Drawing on his own upbringing, Russo set out a central theme: the complicated inheritance a father leaves his children. His men disappoint those around them without turning into villains. Their weakness comes less from cruelty than from insecurity, pride, and the narrowing pressure of limited opportunity.<\/p>\n

National recognition arrived with Nobody’s Fool<\/a> (1993). Its protagonist, Donald “Sully” Sullivan, shows Russo’s gift for binding humor to feeling. Sully is stubborn, irresponsible, generous, and set against change. Russo offers no tidy redemption. He uncovers, by degrees, the loyalty and affection beneath the rough surface. The 1994 film, with Paul Newman<\/a> (1925-2008) as Sully, carried Russo’s work to a far wider audience. Russo later worked with the director Robert Benton<\/a> (1932-2025) on the screenplay.<\/p>\n

His academic satire Straight Man<\/a> (1997) moved from the dying factory town to the disorder of higher education. Through the comic ordeals of the English professor William Henry Devereaux Jr., Russo showed that bureaucratic absurdity and private disappointment flower as readily on a campus as in a failing mill town. AMC<\/a> adapted the novel as the series Lucky Hank<\/a> (2023), with Bob Odenkirk<\/a> (b. 1962) in the lead.<\/p>\n

His masterwork, Empire Falls<\/a> (2001), won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction<\/a>. Around the diner manager Miles Roby, in a fading Maine mill town, Russo set class division, domestic violence, adolescence, religion, and economic decline within a wide and intimate portrait of community. He does not explain social trouble through ideology. He shows how history settles into family relations and individual character. The HBO<\/a> adaptation, with Ed Harris<\/a> (b. 1950), Helen Hunt<\/a> (b. 1963), Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/a> (1967-2014), and Newman, drew wide praise.<\/p>\n

Later novels widened his emotional and thematic reach while they held to his central concerns. Bridge of Sighs (2007) follows lifelong friendship, memory, and artistic ambition through another struggling town. Nearly two decades after publication the book found a second life when Oprah Winfrey<\/a> (b. 1954) chose it for her book club in August 2025 and introduced a new generation of readers to that long and crowded novel. That Old Cape Magic (2009) turns toward marriage, aging, and family inheritance through a middle-aged academic. Everybody’s Fool (2016) and Somebody’s Fool (2023) return to Sully’s North Bath decades after Nobody’s Fool and show how a community changes while it keeps its deepest patterns. Chances Are… (2019), built around three aging college friends reunited on Martha’s Vineyard<\/a>, proved he could leave his industrial settings without leaving his subjects of regret, memory, and loyalty.<\/p>\n

Russo has also written distinguished short fiction, among it The Whore’s Child and Other Stories (2002) and Trajectory (2017). His memoir, Elsewhere (2012), opens the clearest view of the autobiographical roots of the fiction. It traces his hard, loving bond with his sharp and ambitious mother, whose drive made his education possible and also created lasting strain. The book does more than recount a life. It shows how experience turns into fiction through memory and imagination.<\/p>\n

His essays, gathered in The Destiny Thief (2018) and Life and Art (2025), set out the thinking under the fiction. Russo argues that a writer must meet even his most flawed characters with affection rather than judgment. Honest realism, he holds, rests on compassion. Humor again serves a serious end. It lets a character keep his dignity as security, family, or ambition starts to slip.<\/p>\n

Alongside the fiction, Russo has built a substantial career as a screenwriter. Beyond the adaptations of Nobody’s Fool and Empire Falls, he worked with Benton on films including Twilight<\/a> (1998), and later co-wrote The Ice Harvest<\/a> (2005) and Keeping Mum<\/a> (2005). Screenwriting sharpened an already fine ear for speech and strengthened his habit of revealing character through talk rather than long exposition.<\/p>\n

Across his career Russo has resisted easy political and cultural narratives about the American working class. Economic decline shapes his fictional worlds, yet it never fully explains how people behave. Character, family history, local custom, chance, and moral choice carry equal weight. His towns are poor in money and rich in psychology, peopled by men and women whose flaws cannot be separated from their virtues. This refusal to reduce people to symbols has let readers across political and cultural lines see themselves in the work.<\/p>\n

Russo stands within the line of nineteenth-century realism rather than postmodern experiment. His prose is clear and patient, simple in a way that hides its craft. He favors dialogue, observed detail, and slow emotional accumulation over display or trickery. Even his longest novels hold their shape because each scene deepens character instead of pushing plot along.<\/p>\n

Certain themes recur through most of the work. Fathers disappoint sons and remain objects of lasting love. Mothers join sacrifice to emotional dominance. Bright children dream of escaping a small town and find themselves tethered to it. Marriage offers refuge and confinement together. Economic decline shapes identity without fixing it. Above all Russo returns to forgiveness, not as sentiment but as an acknowledgment of human limit. His characters rarely grow heroic. They grow more honest about themselves and more forgiving of others.<\/p>\n

His honors reach beyond the Pulitzer to France’s Grand Prix de Litt\u00e9rature Am\u00e9ricaine in 2017, a sign of the international standing of the work. He and his wife, Barbara, have long made Maine their home, a landscape now nearly as central to his fiction as the upstate New York of his boyhood.<\/p>\n

His forthcoming novel, Under the Falls (2026), arrives from Knopf<\/a> on August 11 and marks his most direct turn toward crime fiction. It follows Tyler Sinclair, a rock musician who returns after nearly twenty years to his small upstate New York hometown for a benefit concert honoring a boyhood friend left paralyzed by an accident. The homecoming uncovers old resentments, betrayals, and a chain of violence that reaches back to the reason for his flight. Rather than abandon his territory, Russo sets the pace of a thriller inside the moral landscape he has built across four decades, and joins suspense to his usual psychological depth and his sympathy for flawed people.<\/p>\n

Russo holds a distinct and increasingly rare position in contemporary American letters. He sits at the meeting of literary realism and popular storytelling, and he joins psychological depth to broad accessibility. Few novelists of his generation have rendered ordinary American lives, above all those shaped by economic decline, family duty, and the stubborn hold of place, with more generosity, humor, or moral precision. Four decades after Mohawk he refines rather than reinvents his world. Under the Falls suggests he remains willing to test new forms while he keeps the qualities that have long set his work apart: emotional honesty, unsentimental compassion, and a steady faith that the most ordinary life holds inexhaustible drama.<\/p>\n

Whom Russo Forgives<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Russo states a creed. The writer must meet even his most flawed characters with affection rather than judgment. Honest realism rests on compassion. He has said it in his essays and shown it across forty years of fiction, and readers take it as the mark of his generosity. A principle, though, falls on everyone. Russo’s compassion does not. It falls on some men and skips others, and the pattern of who receives it and who does not holds steady from book to book. Alliance Theory<\/a> gives a way to read that pattern.<\/p>\n

David Pinsof, David O. Sears, and Martie Haselton argue<\/a> that political belief systems do not grow from abstract values like equality or authority. They grow from alliances. A man supports his allies and opposes his rivals, and the moral standards he reaches for are the tools he uses to do it. The theory runs on two assumptions. People possess a psychology for choosing allies, and people use a set of biases to support those allies in conflict. The first sorts the world. The second narrates it. Pinsof and his colleagues make one move worth holding onto here. They drop ingroup and outgroup for ally and rival, because a man can ally with a group without joining it. He can feel allegiance to police officers without being one, or resentment toward the rich while poor. A novelist allies with kinds of men. He need not be them. He needs only to take their side.<\/p>\n

Russo chooses his allies by the cues the theory names. Similarity comes first. His sympathetic men share an origin: the dying mill town, the tannery street, the family with more pride than money. Sully in Nobody’s Fool, Sam Hall in The Risk Pool, Miles Roby in Empire Falls, Lou Lynch in Bridge of Sighs. They come from the same few blocks and carry the same wounds. Transitivity comes second. The men Russo loves stay loyal to the town’s people and stand against the town’s owners. They take no part with the developers, the bankers, the families who hold the deeds. Side with the town’s rivals and you forfeit the warmth. Interdependence comes third. Russo’s good men live inside a web of small mutual aid, the loaned twenty, the patched roof, the ride to the hospital, the job handed to a man who needs one. Sully and his crew survive on this traffic of favors. The web is the proof of membership. A man who needs no one, and whom no one needs, stands outside it.<\/p>\n

The rivals are as consistent as the allies. The owner and the controller, Francine Whiting in Empire Falls, who holds the town through the river and the mill her family dammed and shuttered. The climber who looks down on where he came from, Clive Peoples Jr. in Nobody’s Fool, the bank man with his plan for an Ultimate Escape theme park, embarrassed by his mother and her tenants. The vain self-improver who takes another man’s wife, Walt Comeau, the Silver Fox with his health club and his whitened teeth. The careerists of Straight Man, climbing the small ladder of a failing English department. The parents of That Old Cape Magic, two academics who spent their lives certain they deserved a finer address than the one they got. These men and women leave, rise, or align with money, and the narration cools the moment they do.<\/p>\n

Once the sides are set, Russo narrates the way the theory predicts an ally narrates. Pinsof and his colleagues describe three biases. Each appears on the page as a habit of Russo’s sympathy.<\/p>\n

The first is the perpetrator bias. A man rationalizes his ally’s transgressions, downplays the harm, and supplies the mitigating circumstance. Sully neglects his son, skips his rent, walks off jobs, and bets money he does not have. Russo gives the reader a brutal father behind the man, a body wearing out, a pride that reads as dignity, a town that offered him nothing better. The neglect arrives wrapped in its reasons, and the reader forgives before he has finished judging. The rival’s smaller sins travel without that escort. Walt’s vanity is simply Walt. Clive’s ambition is simply Clive. The owner’s control is character, not circumstance. Russo extends the mitigating circumstance to one side of the ledger and withholds it from the other.<\/p>\n

The second is the victim bias, and with it competitive victimhood. An ally’s grievance gets embellished and moved to the front of the story, and the blame gets laid at the rival’s feet. The town is the wronged party in nearly every Russo novel. The factories closed, the river was dammed and diverted, the work went away, and the men who stayed were left holding a place that the owners had used and discarded. The Whitings did this. The mill families did this. The grievance is real, and Russo presses it hard, and he presses only the town’s. The owners keep no diary of their own losses on his pages. One side’s injury is the engine of the book. The other side’s injury does not exist.<\/p>\n

The third is the attributional bias, and here Russo’s memoir gives the clearest case. A man credits his ally’s virtues to character and blames his ally’s failures on circumstance, then reverses the accounting for his rival. Sully’s loyalty and Miles’s decency are simply who these men are, native and uncaused. Their poverty and their stalled lives come from outside, from luck and history and other men’s choices. The rival earns the opposite treatment. Whiting wealth is inheritance and control, never merit. The climber’s rise is folly by nature. In Elsewhere Russo writes his mother, Jean, a hard and demanding woman who shaped and strained his whole life, and late in the book he reaches the understanding that recasts her: she was ill, and the behavior he might have charged to her character belonged to a sickness she could not govern. The reattribution is an act of love. It is also the attributional bias in its purest form, the external cause that turns a difficult woman into a wronged ally and lifts the verdict the disposition would have earned.<\/p>\n

Pinsof and his colleagues separate morality from politics. Morality is about cooperation and impartiality. Politics is about conflict and loyalty. They argue that partisans dress loyalty as principle, because calling your side moral and the other side immoral is how you draw the bystander to your side. Russo’s creed is that framing performed at the level of art. He calls his distribution of sympathy compassion, and compassion is a moral word, and the word converts a loyal act into a principled one. He forgives his allies and withholds from his rivals, and then he names the withholding clear sight, the realist’s refusal to flatter. The charge here is not bad faith. The theory assumes every man runs this psychology, the novelist no more and no less than his reader. A writer who claimed to spread his sympathy evenly across owner and worker, climber and stayer, the one who left and the one who stayed, would be the one to distrust. Russo at least aims his warmth where his loyalties lie, and aims it well.<\/p>\n

A reader brings his own loyalties to the book, and a reader whose rivals are Russo’s rivals finds the distribution just. He supplies the transitivity himself. The mercy reads to him as wisdom about human nature, because the men receiving the mercy are the men he was already prepared to love, and the men denied it are the men he was already prepared to resist. The novel recruits him as a third party to the town’s side, and he joins without noticing he has chosen. A reader who came in with the other set of loyalties, who admired the strivers and the ones who escaped and made something the town could not give them, would feel the partiality as a draft under the door. He would see that the climber never once gets the mitigating circumstance, that the woman who leaves is drawn thinner than the man she leaves, that the owner is denied the interior life the failure is granted in full. He would call the warmth selective, and he would be right, in the exact degree that the congenial reader is right to call it wisdom.<\/p>\n

So the compassion is real, and it is aimed, and the two facts do not cancel. Russo loves the men he loves with a steadiness few novelists reach. He built that love along a line, the line between the rooted and the risen, the loyal and the gone, the town and its owners, and he wrote the side-taking so well that taking the side feels like understanding people. A reader who finds the books congenial has been told, accurately, whose side he is on.<\/p>\n

A conservative magazine has claimed him: City Journal ran a long appreciation titled “Tales of the Deplorables,”<\/a> praising Russo as the rare serious writer who took the left-behind blue-collar town seriously when literature treated such men as rednecks and buffoons, and reading Straight Man as a road map to what college campuses have become. The right reads him as theirs. So the stigmatized populist reader does find his own dignity restored on the page, and the work draws no censure from his coalition.<\/p>\n

Russo does not smuggle the Trump voter past the guard. He launders him, and he does it in the open. After 2016 he went on NPR<\/a> and said he was heartbroken that the people he loved had lined up with Trump, and that the slogan he heard was Make America white again. He told another interviewer<\/a> that Sully and Miss Beryl would never have been fooled by Trump. Read through Alliance Theory, that is a perpetrator bias turned on his own allies. His working men get the full dignity and get cleared of the sin in the same breath. The good ones would have seen through it. The bad vote belongs to a fooled subset offstage. This is how the establishment reader is licensed to love the population: Russo hands him a White working class scrubbed of the 2016 ballot, so the affection costs him nothing with his own side.<\/p>\n

The deeper reason both coalitions can hold him is where the venom lands. Pinsof’s account splits the American upper class into two warring factions, the business elite and the intellectual elite. Russo aims contempt at both. The owner who dammed the river and shut the mill, Francine Whiting, is the business elite, and savaging her reads as anti-capital, which the left can sign. The careerist academics of Straight Man are the intellectual elite, and savaging them reads as anti-PMC, which the right can sign. He fires at each upper-class camp, so the reader in either lower coalition takes the half that flatters his side and forgives the rest. That double aim is what makes him claimable twice.<\/p>\n

The master device, though, is that Russo is the defector, and he flagellates the class he climbed into from the inside. He has said outright that he became one of those elites Trump voters despise. He is the Gloversville boy who got the PhD and the professorship, and he turns the knife on the academy as a member of it. That self-implication buys him the license. The populist reads an insider exposing the elite. The establishment reads a member doing healthy self-criticism. Neither side can call him a traitor, because the man attacking the professional class is paying his own dues to do it. The defector who confesses escapes the punishment the defector who denies would draw.<\/p>\n

The nationalist reader keeps the restored dignity and discards Russo’s editorial about who got fooled. He supplies his own transitivity, the same move City Journal makes when it reads Straight Man as a prophecy of campus rot Russo never wrote. The author’s disclaimer travels worse than the affect. People remember the love Russo built for the men. They forget the paragraph where he votes.<\/p>\n

Russo is a bridging figure two super-alliances each read as their own property, which is exactly why no one stones him.<\/p>\n

Russo’s work aligns with the observations of sociologist Stephen P. Turner in his books The Social Theory of Practices<\/a>, Understanding the Tacit<\/a>, Explaining the Normative<\/a>, Liberal Democracy 3.0<\/a>, and The Politics of Expertise<\/a>.
\nTurner’s lifelong subject is the gap between two kinds of competence. One is tacit, embodied, picked up by exposure and habituation, carried in the hands and the ear, never fully stated. The other is explicit, codified, taught as rules, administered by people whose standing comes from holding the codes. Turner spent three books arguing that the tacit cannot be packed into the explicit without remainder, and he spent the expertise books arguing that a knowledge class governs more and more of life by converting tacit local competence into explicit rules it then certifies and enforces. Explaining the Normative is the deflationary heart of it. The “normative,” the realm of correctness and ought, is not a special substance the experts have discovered. It is a practice of holding men accountable, dressed as moral knowledge.
\nNow read Russo through that. The end of Straight Man puts a room full of academics in a space they cannot escape, and the narrator notes that any bricklayer or plumber would have been out in a minute. That is the whole Turner contrast in one joke. The tacit, practical man solves the room. The explicit, theorizing class cannot believe what happened to it. Russo credits the competence that lives in the hands and finds comedy in the competence that lives in the seminar. His towns run on tacit know-how and a web of local practice. The university, the bureaucracy, the HR office run on codes. When the two meet, the codes look absurd, because Russo is standing where the tacit stands and watching the explicit try to govern what it cannot see.
\nThe PMC apparatus, the speech code, the training, the DEI module, the ever-finer adjustment of what may be said, is exactly the explicit-normativity machine Turner describes, and Russo’s world precedes it and is illegible to it. Good. That is the alignment, and it is strong.
\nRusso is not “strongly heteronormative” the way a man holds a position. His towns are heteronormative the way water is wet, without anyone proposing it, a tacit setting nobody in the book has been asked to defend. Call that an ideology and you have done precisely what the normativist does when he reads a settled practice as a stated claim and then demands the speaker account for it. The force of the Turner reading is that Russo makes no normative case at all. He inhabits. The instant you list him as anti-feminist, anti-DEI, anti-this-and-that, you have turned him into a position-holder in the explicit game, which is the game his fiction sits outside.
\nRusso’s rootedness is communal, economic, biographical, the attachment of a man to the mill town that made him and the people who stayed. It is not the ethnic-territorial mysticism that phrase names, and Russo himself put distance between his men and the racial version of populism when he said the slogan he heard in 2016 was make America white again and called it heartbreaking.
\nRusso is knowledge-class, the Gloversville boy who took the PhD and the chair, he became one of the elites Trump voters despise. His stated politics are liberal. Russo writes from inside the knowledge class with his loyalty pointed at the form of life that class cannot codify.
\nThere are few contemporary novelists my male friends can read with joy, Russo is one of the tiny few. In fact, I can’t even think of another. Perhaps Jonathan Franzen.
\nRusso never calls the male reader to the stand. He hands him a man who drinks and skips out and lets his son down, renders him with affection, and asks the reader to laugh and forgive rather than judge. Much of the celebrated fiction a man picks up now does the reverse. It puts him on notice. It wants him aware, accountable, examined. He reads that the way he reads a performance review. Russo reads like a place where someone is glad he came in.
\nThe reason the living version is rare ties back to the reigning apparatus, the prize committees, the review pages, the workshops, the people who decide which working novelist counts, come out of the same class that runs the refining of correct speech. That system rewards the book that performs the accounting and overlooks the book that credits a flawed man and moves the plot. So the joy-for-men novelist tends to come from one of two places. Either he is older, his persona set before the turn and grandfathered into the canon the way Russo is, or he lives in genre, where the prestige police patrol less and a man can write loyalty and appetite and violence and dialogue without apologizing for them.
\nClosest to Russo’s own ground are William Kennedy<\/a>, the Albany novels and Ironweed<\/a>, upstate working men and drink and ghosts; Russell Banks<\/a>, Affliction<\/a> and Continental Drift<\/a>, blue-collar New England decline in a darker key; Kent Haruf<\/a>, Plainsong<\/a>, plain decent men on the Colorado plain told with almost no narration at all; and Richard Ford<\/a>, the Frank Bascombe books<\/a>, a rueful comic male interior a man recognizes in himself.
\nFor the larger appetite, the men who write hunger and the physical world, try Jim Harrison<\/a>, Legends of the Fall<\/a> and the Brown Dog stories<\/a> and Dalva<\/a>, food and dogs and rivers and women with no apology in him anywhere; Larry McMurtry<\/a>, Lonesome Dove<\/a> above all, which a great many men name as the one book they would take to the island; and Pete Dexter<\/a>, Train<\/a> and Paris Trout<\/a>, hard and spare.
\nThe genre houses provide masculine joy. Richard Price<\/a>, Clockers<\/a> and Lush Life<\/a>, writes the best male dialogue going. Dennis Lehane<\/a>, Mystic River<\/a>, gives you loyalty and class and grief in working Boston. Elmore Leonard<\/a> is pure pleasure and not a wasted word. Daniel Woodrell<\/a>, Winter’s Bone<\/a>, is Ozark country rooted to the bone.
\nIf you want the rooted-and-porous strain in particular, the membership-in-a-place strain, Wendell Berry<\/a> and the Port William novels<\/a>, Jayber Crow<\/a> and Hannah Coulter<\/a>, go deeper into it than Russo does, though Berry trades the comedy for elegy and asks more patience of you.
\nLook at how many of those dates close. That is your answer about why the shelf felt empty. The living, celebrated, joy-for-men novelist sits close to a contradiction in the present prestige economy, and Russo holds the slot nearly alone because both sides agreed, each for its own reasons, to let him keep it.<\/p>\n

The Same Word for Different Gods<\/strong><\/p>\n

Sully is sixty and his knee is finished. A man with that knee takes the disability money, signs the form, lets a doctor in Schuyler Springs certify him broken, and spends the settlement at the bar. Sully will not sign. He enrolls instead in a community college class that might qualify him for a partial claim, fights with the instructor, half-attends, and goes back to the work his knee cannot do, hauling and lifting and climbing ladders he should not climb, for a contractor who underpays him and a town that has nothing left to build. He steals Carl Roebuck’s snowblower again as a matter of principle. He rents a room from his old eighth-grade teacher and lets her think she is looking after him while he is looking after her. He owes money he means to pay and does not. He failed his son and will not say so. Watch him from the better town across the valley and you see a man defeating himself on purpose. Stand where he stands and you see the only thing he has, kept whole at the cost of everything that would have made his life easier.<\/p>\n

Call the thing dignity. Sully would not call it anything. The word is mine and the reader’s, and the argument here is about what the word holds, because it does not hold the same cargo for any two men who use it.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker (1924-1974) gave us the apparatus for the question. In The Denial of Death he argued that a man lives under two terrors he cannot face directly. The first is death, the body’s certain end. The second is the smaller and crueler one, the terror of insignificance, the dread that the life adds to nothing, that a man is a brief animal who suffers and is forgotten. Against both terrors a culture hands him a hero system, a project of significance large enough to outlast him, so that by living inside it he can feel his days count against the dark. The hero system tells him what counts as a life well spent. It converts his fear into a program. Becker’s hard point is that the program is a fiction we cannot live without, a causa-sui project, the attempt to father one’s own worth. Take a man’s hero system away and you do not free him. You leave him naked in front of the two terrors with no word for what his suffering was for.<\/p>\n

A sacred value is the load-bearing word inside such a project. It points at whatever that project has made into significance. This is why men who share a language do not share their values though they share the words for them. The word is a finger. It points at the god of the system that uses it. Dignity in Sully’s mouth points at one god. The same word in other mouths points at others, and the gods do not agree, and from each god’s vantage Sully is a different man.<\/p>\n

Inside Sully’s system dignity is subtraction. It is built from what he refuses. He refuses to be certified broken, because the certificate would make official what the terror whispers, that he is finished, that he does not count. He refuses to leave North Bath, because leaving would be a verdict on the whole life, a confession that the town and the trade and the men in it were a mistake a smarter man would have escaped. He refuses the pity of the prosperous, the soft concern of people whose money lets them be kind, because their kindness reclassifies him as a problem and a problem is a thing, not a man. He owes no one anything he cannot pay in his own currency of showing up, taking the hit, and not complaining. His father, Big Jim, was a brutal drunk Sully spent his life refusing to become, and the refusal is its own monument, a life shaped as the photographic negative of another life. Sully’s heroism has no positive content you could write on a plaque. It is the integrity of a man who has declined every offer to be something other than what he is. The town is dying around him, the factories gone, the work gone, the young gone to the spa town or to cities, and Sully stands in the ruin keeping faith with a code that built it. That is the dignity. It is real, and it is doomed, and the second fact does not cancel the first.<\/p>\n

Now hand the same word to other men and watch the god change.<\/p>\n

A Benedictine looks at Sully and sees the deadliest sin wearing the mask of a virtue. The monk rises at two for Vigils, sings the Hours in a cold choir, eats what he is given, owns nothing, and obeys an abbot he did not choose. His dignity is the dignity of the creature, and it is found by subtraction of a different organ, the will. To him a man who will not be helped, who will not be dependent, who authors his own worth by refusing every hand, is not dignified. He is proud, and pride is the first sin and the root of the rest. “He thinks he made himself,” the monk says, “and so he worships the maker.” Sully’s whole project, the causa-sui, the self-fathering, is to the Benedictine the precise shape of damnation. True dignity for the monk lies in receiving, in being a son and not a maker, in letting grace and the brothers carry what the self cannot. The act Sully reads as keeping his soul, the monk reads as losing it.<\/p>\n

The founder in the glass office reads the same act as cowardice. He wears the vest and drinks the cold brew and keeps a term sheet open in another tab. His dignity is optionality, the freedom never to be trapped, the right to exit. To stay nineteen years in a dead town doing dying work is to him not a tragedy but a moral failure, a refusal of agency dressed up as loyalty. “Why would anyone choose that?” he asks, and the question is sincere, because in his system choosing your cage is the one unforgivable thing. Ambition is not a vice to him. It is the substance of dignity. A man who will not scale, who will not move, who lets a bad knee and a bad town define the size of his life, has failed the only test his hero system sets. Where Sully sees fidelity the founder sees surrender.<\/p>\n

The gunnery sergeant gets half of Sully and rejects the other half. He has the high-and-tight and the bearing and twenty years of never quitting a post, and he honors the part of Sully that takes the hit and does not whine. But his dignity belongs to the unit and the chain, the men on his left and right, the colors. A man’s worth in his system flows from subordination to something larger than the man, and Sully is loyal to no chain. He answers to no one and stands beside no one in formation. “You don’t get to opt out, Sullivan,” the sergeant would say, and mean it as the deepest charge he knows. The lone man keeping a private code is to him a half-formed thing, dignity without a flag, courage spent on nothing bigger than himself.<\/p>\n

The grandmother in the apartment with the plastic on the sofa reads dignity through the line. Her husband’s photograph hangs over the rice cooker. She absorbed forty years of insult and labor so the grandson could go to a school whose name she cannot pronounce, and the envelope of cash she presses on him is the visible shape of her worth. Her dignity is what she suffered and gave for the people who come after. By her measure Sully’s account is overdrawn at the one ledger that counts, because he failed his son, drifted out of the boy’s life the way his own father drifted out of his, and a man who breaks the line has no dignity left to refuse anything with. “What did he do it for, then,” she asks, “if not for the children.” In her system the answer Sully gives, that he did it for nothing but to stay himself, is no answer.<\/p>\n

The ethicist in the clinic reads dignity as autonomy, and Sully’s knee horrifies her. She has the advance directive and the morphine pump and the language of patient self-determination, and her sacred value is the right of a man to be free of avoidable suffering and to set the terms of his own body. A man grinding a ruined joint up a ladder he should not climb, refusing the help and the relief on hand, calling the refusal pride, is to her the negation of dignity, a person denied options who has confused the denial with virtue. Her dignity wants Sully comfortable, supported, and in control. His wants none of those things, and would name all three as the soft cage the founder names differently.<\/p>\n

Only the Stoic comes close, and the closeness shows the gap. The Stoic’s dignitas is inner sovereignty, the worth that no loss of fortune can touch, the soul standing upright while the body and the city fall. He alone would look at Sully and almost see a brother, a man indifferent to the verdicts of the prosperous, keeping his bearing in the ruin. But the Stoic locates the sovereign self in the reasoning mind, detached from the world’s wreckage, and Sully locates it in the body’s stubborn fidelity to a place and a trade. The Stoic rises above the dying town. Sully goes down with it on purpose. The Stoic’s dignity is freedom from the world. Sully’s is the refusal to be free of his. They use the one word and point at opposite heavens, and the near-miss is sharper than any of the clean misses, because it shows that even agreement on the word is agreement on nothing.<\/p>\n

Here is the part the other essays leave out. A hero system answers the death-terror by promising to outlast the man. The monk’s order has stood fifteen centuries and will bury him and continue. The founder’s system worships a future it is racing toward. The sergeant’s colors pass to the next class of recruits. The grandmother’s line is the future, by definition. Each of these gods has somewhere to go. Sully’s does not. The working man’s dignity-in-staying is staked on a town with no tomorrow, a trade no one will inherit, a code the young have already left for the cities and the screens. He is the last practitioner of an immortality project with no heir. This is the cruelty and the grandeur Russo found and kept returning to. Becker’s whole theory rests on the hero system being able to promise duration, and Sully runs the program with the duration visibly draining out of it, keeping faith with a god he half-knows is dying. There is no purer denial of death than that, and none more exposed. The comedy and the tenderness in the books live at that exact spot, the man and the dying world he will not abandon, the snowblower stolen one more time on principle from a system that has already won.<\/p>\n

Which returns the question to the reader, where Becker says it always ends. To find Sully’s refusals legible as dignity rather than as folly, a man has to share enough of the system to read the subtraction as significance. The founder cannot. The monk cannot. The grandmother cannot. Each loves a different god and so each sees a different Sully, fool or sinner or coward or saint, and never twice the same. The reader who closes the book warmed rather than exasperated has told on himself. He runs a compatible project. He needs the word to point where Sully points, toward a worth made of fidelity and refusal and staying put, because some part of him is also keeping faith with a god that the smart money has written off. That is not a literary judgment. It is kinship, in the only sense Becker allowed the word, two men sheltering under the same fiction against the same two terrors, calling it by the same name, and meaning, for once, the same thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Richard Russo (b. July 15, 1949) stands among the leading American novelists of working-class life and small-town decline. His fiction tracks the inner lives of ordinary people caught between economic stagnation, family obligation, and the receding promise of postwar America. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literature"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t