If a writer can have no greater skill than empathy, then the ascendance of Richard Russo should come as no surprise: He writes fiction that makes empathy an end unto itself. Russo is talented both at getting inside his characters' heads and at portraying them getting into each other's, a skill on display throughout his new short-story collection, The Whore's Child. Smaller only in bulk and in scale than last year's sprawling Empire Falls, Child circles the theme of the ties that bind men and women, and the way those ties can snap tight just as they reach the point of breaking. In "Joy Ride," the protagonist recalls a childhood road trip spent with a mother desperate to escape the mundane life of a hardware-store owner's wife, but who finds the unknown world equally troublesome. The widowed filmmaker of "Monhegan Light" discovers that his feelings for the wife he never really loved can still be shaped from beyond the grave. In Russo's writing, the past remains present, and its power to upset doesn't diminish with the passing of time. Attending a creative-writing seminar but choosing to create a memoir instead, the elderly nun of the eponymous story unwittingly writes her life into a twist ending that casts everything before it in a different light. Two writers and longtime friends share a hometown in "Poison," but their attitudes toward it, each other, and the toxic mill at its center have, if anything, grown more volatile over the years. One has found fortune, the other a proletariat fervor, and neither could define himself without the other. Like most of Russo's protagonists, these characters have a fallen relationship, but they've found a state of grace in which frustrations and failings have become a part of the fabric of their interaction, and simpler emotions have given way to understanding.