Politics & Power Quote by Richard Russo

Russo is being mischievous in a very craft-minded way: he flatters fiction by insulting reality. The jab at "a lot of people sitting in front of television sets" isn’t just cultural snobbery; it’s a practical complaint about the narrative dead zone of passive consumption. TV-watching is static, private, repetitive - all the things a novelist has to fight when building scenes that move, collide, and reveal character through choice. He’s not denying that this is American life; he’s pointing out that literal fidelity can produce boring art.

The first sentence gives away the real intent: "ignoring" isn’t ignorance, it’s selective vision. Russo is defending the novelist’s right to curate America rather than document it. That means turning down the cultural noise - brand talk, mass entertainment, the ready-made plots of television - so a story can find sharper stakes in work, family, class, weather, local grudges, the stubborn texture of place. His fiction, often rooted in small towns and ordinary people, thrives on the pressure points TV can anesthetize: embarrassment, aspiration, loneliness, the slow violence of economic decline.

There’s also a sly critique of what American culture sells as "life". If the dominant image of the citizen is someone immobilized before a screen, the novelist’s job becomes oppositional: restore motion, consequence, and moral texture. Russo’s cynicism lands because it’s not abstract; it’s observant, and it quietly admits a guilty truth about modern leisure while reminding us that realism isn’t the same as transcription.