This is a dazzling piece of ethnographic work. It moves with the narrative ease and insight of good fiction; it is thoroughly grounded in the real; it is informed by empathy. There are stories aplenty in it, some quoted, some reported, but more important, there is a sense of a world—southeast Texas—that infuses all of it.
Russo’s subject is narrative in the oil refinery country of southeast Texas: Beaumont and environs. Redneck country, MAGA country, bad air, and a lot of cancer country. The research was mostly done before Trump. Russo’s last visit was in 2016. But what he writes portrays what is going on in a world of unempowered whites that helps make sense of where American politics is now. His focus is on a small area around Beaumont, Texas, but the implications of the sensibility he so deftly portrays could be anywhere in the country.
For Russo, stories are not simply things told and heard. They are complex events:
"This book traces what I call an ecology, inhabited by stories, characters, and places. The stories fall under the loose umbrella of hard-luck stories, though not all of them relate to hardship. I see stories as narrative events that do more than tell: they experiment, they play, and they perform the world that they are in. The stories convey feelings that position the teller as having been through something that stays with them: this is how I got here, and this is how it stuck to me….The hard-luck stories of the folks who I dwelt among in SE Texas’s Golden Triangle are a reminder of what many Americans, Texans among them, see the region as a repository for: the accrual of bad feeling " (3-4).
All narrative exists in context. Russo gives us at least two of them: the stories as he encountered them, embedded in his sense of that place and his position in it, and the stories as they function in the lives of the tellers. Each part of the book works from the outside in: he describes a scene as he encountered it, his own narrative of being there. In that description he sometime reports narratives in his own words: those are stories he heard that are part of what he is telling us. And sometimes he quotes stories someone told in their own words.
The sections are grounded in places or scenes: morning coffee in a RV park in Beaumont, in churches, in a health food store, among Messianic Jews, with the HIV positive “Collector of Lost Boys” who directed an LGBTQ+ Pac, in a gay bar, in the Cancer Center, in a low-rent casino, at a funeral.
This is his description of the casino floor:
"Digitized voices from the machines’ characters came in a variety of strange stereotypes that encouraged, scolded, or mocked. They might have a three-second repertoire of movement that engages at a moment of loss or victory: stirring a cauldron, spinning a lasso, pulling a switch that sends a trolley over the cliff, the leopard leaping from the undergrowth. There were cowboys whooping as the stampede starts again (“Heeere we go y’all!”), witch doctors cackling at failure, Easter Island Moai who unlock doors in an affectless baritone. A bikini-clad woman blows a kiss and the heart that issues from her mouth sets the loop in motion again. There were five-second jingles and the sounds of explosions overlaid with the ka-ching of the money drawer, the sound of coins chattering" (109).
And this is what he makes of the time people, many old and in wheelchairs, many with cancer, few, if any, with discretionary money, are up to there:
"What I came to realize was that the casino was also a way of dealing with control in the larger context of people feeling that their lives were spinning out, beyond the limits of what could be dealt with, and the gambling industry, whose billboards seemed to absorb all the light and gloss into the strange flickering eyes of the models depicted on them, funneled the untethered future of the necropastoral machine into their rooms, where time doesn’t exist" (107).
He retells a wonderful story about a drag performer whose car ran out of gas on a lonely Texas highway:
"He was in full drag, street Pageantry: beaded fringed leather jacket, Annie Potts wig, and tight leopard dress. He was trying to flag somebody down off the feeder road of I-10. His Miata dead on the shoulder, red pumps in his hand. He was holding his thumb out and walking backward. He was in danger, and he conveyed a danger in his step, the heaviness of the scene’s potentials warded off by the toughness of his gait. Two rednecks came up, thinking him a lady, and helped him, looking at his legs and leering the whole time" (82-83).
They push his car to a gas station. Russo describes the encounter with the lady inside (he is now telling his story of the story told to him), who understands the situation, how he filled his car and was followed home by the two rednecks, who by this time knew he wasn’t a damsel in distress. When he turned in his driveway, “they kept on driving, giving him a lazy wave and a honk. They had merely continued the performance of character, accompanying the lady home. No one makes eye contact, and no one loses face.
The story—and others like it—reminds me of one of those early Almodóvar films populated by characters with whom at first you cannot identify or like or love, whom, by the end, you do all three because in Almodóvar’s rendering, those characters become people, individuals, inhabiting a world that was wholly alien to you but now no longer is because you perceive it from their point of view. That’s how empathy in art works and what Russo does so well.
Hard Luck & Heavy Rain has six uncaptioned photographs by Alex Baldi. The first, the frontispiece, is part of a cypress trunk and cypress knees in a swamp. The others are on the title page of each chapter: the “Introduction” (a squashed armadillo on a two-lane road), “The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories” (an oil refinery), “The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God” (a thick arm at the upper left going to a hand holding a cane in the center, an expanse of grass in the center and right foreground and middle, and a small out-of-focus wood-frame house in the center and right background), ”Queer Character and the Golden Triangle” (a drag performer on stage), and “Ringing Out” (a woman’s face from just below the eyes to just under the chin, an oxygen tube in her nostrils). I first thought that photographs of the sites and speakers might be useful, but I was wrong. The book has no need of more photos: the five he uses are perfect visual metaphors for the text that follows, and the texts are so powerful it would have been diminished by anything more specific. Russo’s writing fills the mind’s eye.
The book was a long time gestating: five years of research, seven years since then to PhD thesis and book. It shows. Hard Luck & Heavy Rain is a book worth reading on its own. It is fascinating throughout, from its opening sentence (“All hidden kingdoms have their thresholds”) to the funeral with which it ends, which has a passing reveal that might have seemed important 100 pages earlier but here is hardly important at all. That one casual remark enacts part of what the book is about: this is a world of contradictions—you may not know what you think you know, and what you do know may not matter the way you assume it does. That subtle parsing of meaning only comes with a long time doing the work.
There is a lot of scholarship embedded in Russo’s narrative, but softly: the narrative never serves the scholarship; the scholarship helps or clarifies Russo’s own explanations of what is going on, as it should.
Hard Luck & Heavy Rain is necessary reading for anyone interested, working in, or teaching American politics now, conspiracy theory, narrative performance and function, fieldwork, or popular and folk culture. James Agee would have loved it.
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[Review length: 1,381 words • Review posted on November 11, 2023]