Ask Richard Russo about the state of modern writing, and he has no doubts about the current balance of power. Novels: good. Movies: bad. But, Russo adds, television is where it's at. 'It really is a golden age of television drama,' he says when we meet in London. 'Programmes like The Wire, Mad Men and The Sopranos are some of the best work that has ever been done. We are so privileged to be watching these great series.'
If anyone is qualified to comment on the relative merits of all three art forms, that person is 61-year-old Russo. The author of seven novels that cast an amused but compassionate eye across life in small-town America, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls. No one was more surprised by this triumph than Russo himself, who had grown accustomed to metropolitan critics patronising his rambling shaggy dog stories about semi-rural life. For Russo, the bias says less about his subject and more about his humorous tone. 'If there's a prejudice in critical circles, it's about writers with comic visions. They are so entertaining, they can't possibly be important.'
Russo may work on the smallest of canvases, but he says they provide the perfect context for grand narratives such as love, work, community, history and class. 'I want to explore how people with a lot of money interact with people with no money. That's the great things about small towns. There are barriers, but the barriers are circumvented on the street, in the school or coffee shop.'
In recent years, Russo has supplemented his fiction by working extensively as a screenwriter for screens both great and small. He collaborates regularly with Robert Benton, Oscar-winning director of Kramer vs Kramer, who turned Russo's comic masterpiece Nobody's Fool into a movie starring Paul Newman. Newman also starred in Empire Falls, which Russo himself adapted for an Emmy-nominated HBO series.
This lucrative new string on his professional bow enabled Russo to give up his day job as an academic.
Having just completed two years of what he describes as 'cultural jury duty', Russo says he is optimistic about the state of the contemporary American novel: he was a judge for the Hemingway Award (for the best first work of fiction), and also edited the 2010 anthology of The Best American Short Stories. 'There was some breathtaking work. There are some young writers like Hannah Tinti, Michael Dahlie, Ed Park and Joshua Ferris who are amazing. They all have a love of language and the desire to get to the core of the way we behave.'