In "Nobody's Fool", set in the mid-1980's in upstate New York, we meet Sully, a mostly harmless guy who seems to raise the ire of about everybody he meets, with the exception of his best friend and his landlady. True, Sully can be a real pain in the neck, but he's oh so fun to read about, what with his troubles with his dad's ghost, his distant son, his sometime employer, his slow best friend, and the subplot about a spastic Doberman and the volley over a stolen snowblower. I could go on and on, but it's too complex to compress into a short review.
Russo has a way of making you wonder exactly how things will turn out for our protagonists, since many of them paint themselves into a corner (see also Russo's "Straight Man".) This book is a thick read, but I wished it had gone on even longer. I did not find myself wishing that the book was about 100 pages shorter, or that there was a better interplay of action and dialogue. This book is Russo at top form, and it shows. Every page in this book is a delight and despite the heft, the story is over much too soon. Highly recommended.
Small town scenes have always been fertile fictional ground. Why? They present manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over.
Nobody's fool is Russo's third small town upstate New York tale after Mohawk and the extraordinary Risk Pool. "Nobody's Fool," is set in North Bath, N.Y., a fractionally less blighted version of the blue-collar dead end where his earlier novels, "Mohawk" and "The Risk Pool," take place.
What's turned up the heat in North Bath is the possibility that a theme park, to be called the Ultimate Escape, may be built there, and may breathe some economic life into the moribund former spa. Once a thriving resort, the town has declined steadily since 1868, "when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future."
Donald Sullivan-Sully to the inhabitants of North Bath-is the novel's incorrigible and engaging hero. Says Russo in the book: "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable -- all of which he stubbornly confused with independence."
Sixty years have knocked Sully from one part of North Bath to another, from his violent father's house to the rooms he rents now from the elderly Miss Beryl Peoples, his former teacher. A painful knee injury has him working odd jobs, off the books. Sully is a partly domesticated, slightly maddened bear, feinting and jabbing at the center of the book's many subplots and hard-luck characters. His estranged lover, Ruth, has a husband she despises and a daughter whose own husband is trying to kill her. Sully's son, Peter, has serious marital troubles, two difficult children, a crazily possessive mother, a sick stepfather -- and he's been denied tenure at the small college where he teaches. Miss Beryl has been getting lost on her excursions around town, and she is compelled to fend off the grabby, selfish meddling of her banker son, Clive Jr. -- one of the main boosters of the Ultimate Escape. Even Sully's best friend, Rub (he's too dim to find trouble to get into), is undone by his wife's late-blooming kleptomania.
As with all Russo's novels, knowing the outline of the story utterly fails to convey the complexities and emotional quagmires that the story involves. These are deep textured, richly woven stories that Russo writes. To read one of these books is more like to move into town-you are left with the sense that you're not reading this, you're living it. This is definitely the case with Nobody's Fool.
I personally consider Russo one of our greatest living writers. This book is classic Russo, the type of work that fully works to establish his exalted position. This is not a novel to be missed.