Riveting narrative on OCD

Elsewhere is one of the few non-fiction books novelist Richard Russo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for Empire Falls, has written. Most of his novels are set in Gloversville, in the foothills of the Adirondacks, a thriving town that manufactured elegant gloves until the 1950s, when glovemaking was overtaken by commercialism.

Since Russo’s father had left, her son became the main person in his mother’s life, if not her obsession. It was trying to figure out his relatonship to his mother that led to this book. In it he focuses on that – with only chronologial references to his own background (college, teaching, his marriage, children and the daring decision to give up tenure and other securities in favor of an uncertain future as a writer).

His mother, clever and dominating, affected her son’s life for most of her (and his) life, usually in a profoundly negative way. She couldn’t find happiness with her second husband; accused her son of not loving her; quarreled with her own parents; and moved about restlessly, fiercely determined to support herself (at one point by insisting on moving in with her mother’s sister – with whom she didn’t get along either).

She was deluding herself that, though older – emaciated by now – she could live independently, supplying her own domestic needs, become young again and somehow find the happiness that had eluded her all her life, if only others would follow her wishes.

Hers was was a peripatetic life: from the Adirondacks to Arizona to Maine, with each move interrupting her son’s own life and his decisions about it. In the end she lived in Maine, complaining about everything and everyone there.

He would drive a half hour every week to take her grocery shopping – she didn’t drive. Now he was a college professor, conflicted about where and how he wanted to live, in that those decisions had to be made with her in mind.

But the many moves and conflicts of those 30 years or so were in a fast-moving incident and moods-filled time with Russo overwhelmingly experiencing a “ growing certainty of my mother lost in some labyrinth of her own thoughts and impulses and that if she was ever going to exit this maze, she’d done so already.”

Earlier, after Richard turned 21, his father took more interest in him, since his son could now accompany him on various drinking bouts. On one of these, his father said, “You do know your mother’s nuts, don’t you.”

This came as a profound shock to him. As recently as last week on NPR – 25 or 30 years later – he spoke to his interviewer of that phrase and how it affected him. Was he, then, in fact different from others? How was he himself affected?

She was now pushing 80. Russo himself started burning his bridges; his wife started training to be a real estate agent and his girls now in college, his first novel accepted, he was more objectve, though still analizing the grip the relatonship had on him; still fearing he would slip into one of his mother’s depressions.

This is the crisis of the book: what of her condition does he share? He relates past and present compulsions and evaluates whether whatever they were, they had made him a more successful person. He concludes that it was just dumb luck that – considering the obsessive nature of the behavior he had noticed in himself – he had been led into positive paths rather than the more self-destructive ones of his mother.

He “had” to write. There follows an interesting description of the kind of periods of discouragement and change a writer goes through before he is satisfied. He calls it “an unreasoning feeling of must” – utilizing “obsession to my advantage.”

His daughter, Kate, experienced symptoms. Yes, it was “obsessive-compulsive disorder. With appropriate treatment she should be fine: without it, it would eat her alive.”

She recognized it early and, in fact, was fine.

He bought a book on the subject and read it with “full-blown horror and nausea.” There were a list of symptoms that had, in fact, eaten his mother alive.

The book he bought was a truly illuminating report of what a patient suffers from OCD; the book Russo wrote conveyed in riveting narrative in the story just concluded – from funny to heartbreaking – what it’s like to be a captive and “eaten alive” by this condition. He is a master writer and I look forward to reading his novels.

Book info:
Elsewhere
By Richard Russo
Alfred A. Knopf, $25.95

Posted by Rae Eastman on February 6, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry