Review: Trajectory

Trajectory by Richard Russo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book of four short stories are exactly what I love about Richard Russo. These don’t have the poor, blue collar folks in upstate New York populating the stories from his earlier novels, but have characters more like his later novels, professors and realtors and screenwriters. The writing is pitch perfect. Russo always writes his characters thoughts a level or two deeper than other writers, so you feel you intimately know them. And those thoughts often feel like thoughts I’ve had myself. His humor is humor of reflection and of exercising his knowledge. When his characters are funny, it’s like they are trying to make themselves laugh, and it’s catching. An illustrative passage, while not deep, made me think and reflect on my experiences, and laugh:

Ray had limited experience of Texans, but he’d never met a man from there he liked. The women, on the other hand, were invariably entertaining, having apparently concluded that only a well-lubricated sense of humor was likely to make life with such assholes bearable.


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