CHAPTER 12

LOCATION, LOCATION,
LOCATION: DEPICTING CHARACTER THROUGH PLACE

BY RICHARD RUSSO

My first novel, Mohawk, as it was eventually published, was a kind of ensemble novel that had a dozen or so important characters and employed numerous points of view. Put all the stories together and you had at their center a portrait of a place, a small fictional town in upstate New York, and in the center of that town a dive called the Mohawk Grill.

The town and the grill proved so compelling, at least to me, that I set another novel there. But you may be surprised to learn that the first completed draft of the novel that was published as Mohawk was set in Tucson, Arizona, where I happened to be living when I wrote it. The book was about an elderly woman named Anne Grouse, who began the book bitter and ended up more bitter still—not an emotional trajectory I particularly recommend, though it describes a fair number of contemporary novels.

Beyond these few facts, I don’t really remember much about this early draft. I gave it to a friend and mentor, who read it and told me what I suspected and maybe even knew but certainly didn’t want to hear. He explained that the book wasn’t very good, that being in the company of a bitter person in a long work of fiction isn’t much more fun than being in the company of a bitter person in real life. Also, my writing betrayed a tourist’s knowledge of the Southwest, where I had spent the last six years in a study carrel at the University of Arizona library. On the slender plus side, my friend noted that Anne was a much more interesting person when she was younger, when she still had hopes and dreams and hadn’t managed to mess up her life. About the only scenes that really lived were set in the upstate New York town where Anne was raised—one in a glove shop where Anne’s father worked and the other at a down-at-the-heels amusement park on the lake.

Also, he told me, the minor characters were far more interesting than the major ones.

Well, this brutal honesty pretty much squared with my own sense of the book. The minor characters—mere functionaries, I’d thought—were people who grew out of the place and the necessity of the place. The glove shop where Anne’s father worked was the one my grandfather had spent his entire adult life toiling in, and the dying amusement park, along its shabby midway, was where both my mother in the 1930s and I in the 1950s had learned to dream among the fluttering lights and the rigged games of chance. I was no tourist on that midway, but there was a problem: I wanted to be a tourist there. I’d left my hometown of Gloversville, New York, when I was eighteen, enrolled in a university twice the size of that town, and by the end of my first week there, learned my first lesson: that I’d do well to hide where I was from. For the next ten years, first as an undergraduate, then as a graduate student, I walked backward, erasing my tracks with that wonderful switch we call education. I learned how to read carefully and talk to smart people and work from the outside in when confronted at a table with more than one fork. In becoming a writer, I had intended to make use of these lessons I’d learned and for this reason, I was not pleased to learn that the only things I’d managed to bring to life in my first novel were the things I’d hoped—Judas that I was—to deny.

DISCOVERING YOUR PLACE

Intellectually, of course, I already knew that place was character. That’s Intro Fiction 101. I could illustrate the point with numerous examples from my reading. I knew that London was a character in Dickens, and that it spawned Mr. Micawber, and Crook, and Scrooge. And I could tell what happened to Dickens when he ventured too far from the place that gave him the majority of his people. There’s only one reason people read and teach Hard Times (the only Dickens novel not set, at least partly, in London) when the rest of the Dickens canon is available: It’s short.

And there were plenty of contemporary examples. I could see Larry McMurtry’s characters growing directly out of the west Texas soil, and its windswept small towns, and then saw what happened when he tried to set a novel in Las Vegas. I’m sure McMurtry spent serious time in Vegas, and not in a study carrel either, but still.

Yes, I knew that place was character, but I knew it without, somehow, believing it. Otherwise, how to explain the sense of wonder I felt in the rewriting, the reimagining, of the book I eventually published as Mohawk? How else to explain the surprise I felt when, having created the Mohawk Grill from the memory of the half-dozen greasy spoons I frequented with my father, I discovered enough vivid characters to occupy every stool at the Formica counter?

INTERIOR PLACE

There’s a distinction that’s often made in discussions of place—that is, the difference between interior and exterior setting. Interior setting has come to mean, basically, an indoor place. The setting of The Glass Menagerie is primarily an interior one—Amanda Wingfield’s apartment. We never leave it, never venture out of doors. We’re told the action takes place in St. Louis, but it could be any city. Usually the play is staged in such a way that we glimpse an urban view from the windows of the Wingfield apartment—close brick walls and dark fire escapes and neighboring windows with tattered shades. The Wingfield apartment also has a fire escape, where Tom retreats to smoke, but the play makes clear that the fire escape is an illusion. There’s no real escape for the characters, and none for viewers while we watch.

Most beginning writers do a pretty good job of interior setting because they understand that the objects people own comment on them—at times, even define them. Anyone who needs convincing might take a look at Mary Gordon’s “The Important Houses,” included in The Best American Short Stories 1993. In the back matter of the book, Gordon admits that the story isn’t really a story at all, but rather an excerpt from a long memoir that happens to read like fiction, despite its lack of anything like plot or chronology or scene. What’s amazing is that we get a marvelous sense of character despite the fact that we never meet any of the people, either directly or dramatically, who live in the houses she describes. The very contents of the grandmother’s house offers us a portrait of the woman who owns it—honorable, harsh, judgmental, daunting, repressed, dark. The narrator describes the house:

… every object in her house belonged to the Old World. Nothing was easy; everything required maintenance of a complicated and specialized sort …. Each object’s rightness of placement made me feel honored to be among them.

The other important house is the residence of the narrator’s aunt, whose husband owns a liquor store:

The house was full of new or newish objects: the plastic holders for playing cards, like shells or fans, the nut dishes in the shape of peanuts, the corn dishes in the shape of ears of corn, the hair dryer like a rocket, the make-up mirror framed by light bulbs, the bottles of nail polish, the ice bucket, the cocktail shaker, the deep freeze.

Though an apprentice writer’s descriptions may not be as lush as Gordon’s, even beginners understand and accept the basic principles of interior setting—that a person who owns an ice bucket and cocktail shaker is different from someone who owns a claw-footed tub for bathing.

EXTERIOR PLACE

The relationship between character and exterior setting is more mysterious. We don’t own a landscape, a street, a neighborhood, or a river in the same sense that we own a cocktail shaker or a claw-footed tub. Nor can they be said to own us, in the way Thoreau meant when he observed in Walden that the things we own can own us in return. True, exterior landscapes can “run through us,” in the sense that the river runs through the two brothers in Norman Maclean’s memoir. But because the relationship is more tenuous, less sharply defined, it is more likely to be ignored, either in whole or in part, by apprentice writers. I’m forever asking my undergraduates very literal-minded questions about their stories, and the thinly veiled irritation with which these questions are often answered is suggestive.

Where does this story take place? I’ll ask innocently, especially when it doesn’t seem to have taken place anywhere. Well, I’ll be told, it’s really more about the people. In a story with a vague urban setting, I’ll ask, Which city are we in here? It doesn’t really matter, I’ll be informed. Well, okay, but I need to know.

In fact, the need to know is not universally conceded. There are examples of great works of literature where the external setting is not specified, the city is not named, the landscape more symbolic or moral than real. My more sophisticated students will dredge up the ghost of Kafka. Where is the penal colony? We don’t know. We don’t need to know. Okay, I concede the point, but only after sharing an anecdote and some speculative theorizing.

Some years ago, I was making small talk with an influential New York editor, and I asked him what books he was excited to be bringing out on his spring list. He named and described half a dozen. I don’t remember any of the books he wanted to recommend, but I do remember the way he talked about them. The first thing he’d say about each one was where it took place, a fact I remarked upon because it’s often the way I begin talking about books I like and the way people often begin talking about my own books. I hadn’t really given the matter much thought beyond the fairly obvious fact that the “where” of a book is an easy starting place, certainly easier to describe than the “who.” But for this editor, it went much deeper, and it turned out my small talk had opened, or reopened, a vein. All the books he published and wanted to publish, he informed me, were ones with a strong sense of place. He said he had little faith in the vision of writers who didn’t see clearly and vividly the world their characters inhabited. His most powerful need as a reader, he claimed, was to feel oriented. We agreed that we could do that anywhere—on a street in Calcutta, in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, on a boat in the ocean (that is to say, one place was probably as good as another)—but we couldn’t feel oriented if we were nowhere or anywhere.

We discovered, too, that we had similar habits. We often didn’t read very far into books that were set in places we’d never been before putting the book down long enough to consult an atlas. And we also agreed that we didn’t care whether the place in question was fictional or real; we still wanted to know where it was located geographically. We’d both consulted maps of Minnesota to locate Jon Hassler’s Staggerford, and I explained that my Mohawk was located north of the New York State Thruway in the foothills of the Adirondacks.

UNIVERSALITY IN A SMALL TOWN

With some graduate student writers I’ve taught, the prejudice against rich, detailed, vivid exterior settings was also rooted in the fear that the more specific the setting, the more regional and less “universal” the story’s appeal. Nobody wants to be labeled a regional writer. At one point in his career, McMurtry announced his intention to leave Texas and never return in his fiction. He had his reasons, among them, I suspect, a desire to be more a citizen of the world than of Texas. If so, who can blame him?

But a moment’s reflection will suggest the truth of the matter, and that is that there’s no reason to fear the regional label. The American writer of the twentieth century who is the most universal in his concerns is probably William Faulkner, who is also the most regional, having seldom strayed imaginatively outside a single county. The real fear of being labeled regional—in the sense of, say, Hamlin Garland or Sarah Orne Jewett—is its unstated implication. These writers weren’t more regional than Mark Twain and Faulkner; they, I believe, were less talented, less visionary, less true. It’s this kinship with them that we fear, and it’s not a fear that’s rooted in geography. Writers have to recognize and accept an essential artistic paradox—that the more specific and individual things become, the more universal they feel.

The clearest expression of this that I can share with you is in the form of the two most consistent compliments from people who have read my work. “Boy, you really know those small upstate New York towns,” they tell me. Often they explain how they know I know. “Hell, I’ve lived up there all my life,” they say. Or, “I’ve got relatives in Utica and we visit them every year. It’s like visiting a Richard Russo novel up there.” The second group of people pay me what appears to be on the surface a contradictory compliment. “I thought that was my hometown you were writing about,” they’ll say about my Mohawk or North Bath, then they’ll tell me about their hometown in Georgia or Oregon. Even in England I get this. My advice? Don’t try to resolve the paradox of things that are vividly differentiated seeming more universal and familiar as a result. There’s neither mathematical nor scientific logic to this. Just take advantage of it.

DESTINY IN A PLACE

In the end, the only compelling reason to pay more attention to place, to exterior setting, is the belief, the faith, that place and its people are intertwined, that place is character, and that to know the rhythms, the textures, the feel of a place is to know more deeply and truly its people. Such faith is not easy to come by or to sustain in this historical period.

Most people, in any historical period, seem able to focus on only one or two ideas at a time. In the matter of human destiny, an issue of some concern to fiction writers, the question of how people become what they become, why they do what they do, has been settled. In our time, the two great determiners of destiny are race and gender. It was not always this way, of course. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when social class was thought to have been a determining factor in human destiny. Remember the great proletarian novels of the thirties and forties? They seem dated now, in part because the idea of seeing human destiny as determined by class seems not to have survived the second World War and the GI Bill—this despite the fact that in the last two decades, the gap between the haves and have-nots has widened.

For my mother and many others of her generation, the issue is time. Since his death, my mother and I have spent many hours talking about my grandfather, a man who played a central role in our lives. Her devotion to his memory requires fierce loyalty, which in turn makes it difficult for her to admit her father’s frailties. When she’s able to do so, it’s always with the same proviso. “Well,” she says, “I guess he was a product of his time.” She never lets it go at that either. She fixes me with a motherly gaze. We’re all products of our time, she reminds me.

The truth, of course, is that we’re products of a lot of things—race, gender, sexual orientation, time, genetics, and chance among them—and we’re under no obligation to rank these larger forces. What’s interesting to me is that just about the only people I know who seem to believe that place is crucial to human destiny and the formation of human personality are fiction writers. Admittedly, I intuit this from their work, but I think it’s true.

Take Annie Proulx. The Shipping News is, at one level, the story of a man who manages to conquer a gesture. Her protagonist, Quoyle, has a huge jutting chin, courtesy of his Newfoundland genes, and we find him at the beginning of the book self-consciously covering his chin with his hand. Returning to Newfoundland, he finds a place where his movements, clumsy and awkward in New York, feel natural and graceful, a place where he can live without apology, without undue self-consciousness.

Ivan Doig seems to believe in place as a determiner of behavior. Like many western novelists, he suggests that the physical landscape of the West is responsible, at least in part, for philosophical, emotional, political, and spiritual differences between East Coast and West Coast mentalities. Danish author Peter Hoeg is also a believer. No work of fiction I’ve read in recent years is so dominated by a sense of place, where landscapes, interior and exterior, loom so powerfully over character, as in Smilla’s Sense of Snow. Race, gender, and social class are also powerful forces in the novel, but in the end, it is literally Smilla’s sense of snow—of the properties of snow, as well as her ability to navigate in a blizzard that is both physical and moral—that saves her, that provides her with the answers she’s been looking for from the beginning.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE PLACES GONE?

Running contrary to such wisdom is our entire cultural climate, which minimizes the importance of place. Witness all those IBM commercials advertising “Solutions for a small planet.” In these ads, we listen to people in other cultures speaking in foreign languages. Only the clever running subtitles reveal that the people are talking about their computers, their computer needs, which, it turns out, are the same as ours. We all yearn for more megabytes; it doesn’t matter where we live. This message—it is a small world, it doesn’t matter much where you are—is being reinforced by both perception and reality. As James Howard Kunstler points out in The Geography of Nowhere, the interstate system of highways that allows us to travel five hundred miles a day in about half the time it would have taken thirty years ago has also had the unintended effect of making it seem, when we get to our final destination, that we haven’t really gone anywhere. The exit where we get off the interstate is a dead ringer for the one where we got on, their being fifteen hundred miles apart notwithstanding. Interstate travel (even more than air travel, I suspect) also suggests that the places we bypass aren’t worth pausing at, a conclusion difficult to reconcile with the growing sameness of our major destinations.

A few years ago, I was invited to attend the Nashville Book Fair. I’d driven through, or rather around, Nashville many times, but I’d never stopped, never visited. I was put up in the Hilton, which was a lot like other Hiltons I’d stayed at, except you could get grits. The cable television offerings were identical to those offered by our local cable company in Maine, including the Nashville Network. The first of the conference sessions I attended was one on contemporary Southern writing. Several writers I’d long admired tried to identify what made Southern writing southern and to offer suggestions for how to preserve it. I have to say it was one of the stranger discussions I’ve ever listened to, and not just because I was a Yankee. There was little talk of landscape, or the rhythms of daily life, or architecture, or occupations. Members of the audience wanted to discuss the scent of magnolias and the redness of the earth, and a couple of members of the panel nervously admitted to having relocated to places like Massachusetts.

I came away with the distinct impression that even to articulate people who cared about it, our sense of place and what place means is rapidly eroding and that even our vocabulary for discussing place may be gone with the wind. One of the ideas I kept hoping would crop up was the question of how writers should handle the Wal-Mart sameness that is creeping into our cultural life, regardless of where we happen to be located. If what made Southern fiction distinctly Southern was being subtly eroded, couldn’t the same be said for the notion of place in general? There may be a Burger King in every small town in America, but does that mean they should be similarly ubiquitous in our fiction?

I am of two minds on this subject. Personally, I avoid Burger Kings in fiction as I do in life, and for the same reasons. To me, they are neither nourishing nor enjoyable. I am suspicious of the fact that all you have to do is name such places and the reader is located, a kind of cultural shorthand. I prefer places that require and reward lots of description, and my own novels are strewn with the kinds of establishments that are poised on the brink of extinction. This may explain why I’m occasionally accused of harboring a nostalgic view of America. It’s true that I become more curmudgeonly every year, and what’s needed may be younger eyes. I still remember chortling with glee while reading the Sam Hodges novel of the new South, B-Four. Several of the scenes are set in a local IHOP, where the pancake syrup containers are so stuck to the lazy Susans that grown men have all they can do to liberate them.

The simple truth may be that there’s no place in the world, and no object either, that can’t be brought dancing to life when seen by the right eyes. Whether or not Burger Kings deserve a prominent place in our literature is less the issue than whether place itself, which is under siege both in reality and in metaphor, can be rescued from the endangered species list of important concepts.

ADVICE

If I have convinced you that place is an important resource for fiction writers, consider the following practical tips on how to handle place in your fiction.

1. Describe Selectively

The relative importance of place to any given story is independent of the amount of description given it. The best examples I can think of are John Cheever’s Shady Hill stories. They are, in my opinion, the best stories in the Cheever canon. I’ve read and reread them and taught many of them. When one of my students wanted to write a critical essay on the importance of setting in fiction, I suggested the Shady Hill stories, picturing the vivid sense of life’s rhythms that Cheever had created through what I remembered as lush descriptions.

The problem was that when my student read those stories herself, she found very little description. She couldn’t, she told me, find a single sustained passage of description in any of them. Preposterous. “You’ve read ‘O Youth and Beauty!’?” I asked her. “ ‘The Housebreaker of Shady Hill?’” She had. Closely. Which forced me to go back to the stories myself and, of course, she was right. There were very few descriptive details, and those were woven so skillfully into the stories’ drama, in such seemingly subordinate ways, that they were difficult to extract, like molars in the back of the mouth, unseen but with the deepest roots imaginable. What kind of furniture does Cash Bentley hurtle in his friends’ living rooms before his wife shoots him in midair? What’s the architecture of the houses that Johnny Hake burgles? I’d had the impression that such information was offered in these stories. The deep sense of place that emerges from the Shady Hill stories has more to do with life’s rhythms, where things are in relation to other things, whether the characters can walk there and how long that will take, whether they’ll drive or take the train. We won’t be told that the cocktail shaker is pure silver; we’ll be told that it’s sweating in the lazy Sunday midmorning sun. Rendering such passive details active makes us insiders, not tourists. We become giddy, well-heeled drinkers trying to banish hangovers, not sober, anthropological observers of curious behavior.

2. See Clearly From the Start

Something to guard against: My own experience of writing, which may be different from yours, is that even when I acknowledge the importance of the physical world, even when I make mental notes and scribble reminders, I still have to guard against the temptation to believe that I’ll be able to add onto a scene later, and flesh it out after I’ve attended to other matters. If the scene is talky (too reliant on dialogue) or if it’s too interior (too reliant on a character’s thoughts at the expense of the physical world), I’m often tempted to let it go, move on to the next scene, promising to return later with a bucketful of descriptive details.

I know I’m not alone in this. When I complain to my students that their scenes are vague, that the dialogue seems to be coming out of thin air, as if the scene were wired in such a way that we had to choose between the audio and the video, they frequently tell me not to worry, that they’ll go back and add the details of the physical world later. What they want to know is whether the characters are doing and saying the right things. Such an attitude not only ranks the various tasks of the fiction writer, subordinating the objective world, but it suggests something about the process that I’ve never found to be true. When I’m writing badly, I’m almost always in a kind of fast-forward, taking shorthand notes on what the characters are doing and saying. The edges of the picture are fuzzy and blurred by speed. Later, when I realize the scene isn’t working, when I go back and try to “fill in the details,” I find that the details I fill in often invalidate what the characters have said and done. Better and more efficient to slow down and see clearly to begin with. If character can grow out of place, as I’ve suggested, it follows that place cannot be the thing that’s “grafted on” late in the process.

3. Create Distance

My own experience has been that the place I’m living is probably not the place I’m writing about. Now that I’ve lived in Maine for several years, I’m often asked by people who consider me a Maine writer by virtue of my address when I’ll be writing a novel set in Maine. They don’t realize what they’re probably asking is when I plan to leave the state. The simple truth of the matter is, I’ve never written effectively about any place I was currently residing in. I not only need to leave but actually need to have been gone for some time for my imagination to kick in, to begin the process of necessary tempering knowledge.

It may be different for you, but the ability to look out my window and see what I’m describing in a story is not an advantage. If what I’m describing is really there, I’m too respectful of and dependent upon the senses, and the thing described, as a result, will often not have the inner life I want it to have. I’d rather make a mistake, get something physically wrong, put the button on the wrong side of the sleeve, than be dictated to by literal reality, than place intuition and imagination in a straitjacket. Maybe this is just a feeble justification for the many things I get wrong as a result, but I don’t think so.

4. Use Research Selectively

Just as the importance and vividness of place is independent of the amount of description given it, there is also no direct correlation between the vividness of your setting and comprehensive, factual knowledge. Granted, throughout this essay, I’ve been insisting on the essential relationship between place and character, but I’m not particularly advocating Micheneresque research. An intimate understanding of place can lead to character breakthroughs, but that’s not the same as to say that encyclopedic knowledge of the facts of place will yield interesting characters.

Often, the exact opposite will happen. Too much knowledge of the literal can stifle the metaphorical. Many bestsellers give the impression of having been written by tourists for tourists, and such books, for all their insistence upon location, somehow locate me in a world that’s halfway between a library and a good travel agency. The difference between the places in these novels and the places in reality is the difference between the place itself and the picture of it on a color brochure.

A PRODUCT OF PLACE

Finally, even those among you who are convinced by the argument I’ve been articulating about the importance of place and the link between place and character, may not end up as place-oriented in your fiction as I am in mine. The writers I’ve discussed above are, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, like-minded. If I’d chosen different writers to draw examples from, my conclusions might have been different.

I can only give you my sense of how profoundly important place has been to my own life and my life as an artist. If I were black or gay or a woman, chances are my life as a person and as an artist would have been shaped more dramatically by race or gender or sexual orientation. But insofar as I’m a “product” of anything, to borrow my mother’s term, I feel I’m a product of place, of places. And, insofar as my fiction has been a product of anything, since the moment I realized that my first novel could not be set in Arizona, it has been a product of places that have, in turn, offered up people by the dozens.

Some years ago, at an East Coast writers residency, C.J. Hribal, Michael Martone, and I were referred to by some as “the corn boys,” the result, I suppose, of our teaching in Midwestern universities. It was odd for me to be referred to this way and I tried to conceal my annoyance lest it be considered geographical snobbery. I don’t, believe me, consider the small, shabby town in upstate New York where I grew up to be superior to other places, and if I’d grown up in Iowa, I doubt I would have minded much being referred to as a “corn boy.” I simply felt mislabeled, and therefore misunderstood, in much the same way I feel now when I’m referred to as a “Maine writer.”

I may not be “the product” of upstate New York either, but the link is there and I feel it profoundly. How else would I explain the strange dreams I’m subject to for days before I visit my remaining relatives in my hometown? How would I explain the irrational fears that descend upon me when I return, primary among them the fear that I will be killed in an auto accident during one of these quick visits? This was my grandfather’s fear for me. We lived one house down from one of the worse intersections in town, where local drivers routinely ignored a stop sign in plain view, bashing into each other and narrowly missing small children who were crossing the intersection on errands to the corner market. My grandfather feared I’d be run down in sight of the front porch before I could make my mark on the world, and now, forty years later, I have inherited his fear.

How else would I explain the fact that when I pass by the open door of the worst dive in town, I sense that the empty barstool farthest from the light is really mine, that it’s being saved for me, that perhaps in some alternate universe I’m already occupying it, that when the phone rings, I no longer even have to remind the bartender that I’m not there. What these irrational fears have in common is the sense that this place has a claim on me, a claim that may be presented at any time, a claim that seems less perilous to acknowledge than to ignore.

  RICHARD RUSSO is the author of Bridge of Sighs, The Whore’s Child and Other Stories, Straight Man, Nobody’s Fool, Mohawk, and The Risk Pool. He is the recipient of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls.