Richard Russo is often praised for his ability to capture the typical blue-collar town on paper, “to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small town America.” (Houston Chronicle) He does this in Nobody’s Fool by masterfully manipulating points of view to depict/expose his characters from the inside out. Donald Sullivan (Sully), Russo’s main character -- a sixty-year old man with a failing knee, commitment issues, pensions for both drinking and fighting, a heart of gold and a streak of miserable fortune -- embodies Bath. In knowing him, the reader knows Bath, knows small town America. Nobody’s Fool opens in a third person omniscient point of view with a broad description of the town: “Upper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long district, was quietly residential….” With his second sentence Russo brings his reader even closer, to capture his setting: The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it – although Main, from it’s lower end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter mile – were mostly dinosaurs, big aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats. As if narrowing the lens of a camera, Russo guides his reader through the town’s streets and deeper into the story until, at page three, the reader has arrived in Miss Beryl’s front room to look out the window with this old lady. And being thoroughly aware of what she sees (Russo’s done an excellent job of description), the reader takes no objection to suddenly being aware of Miss Beryl’s inner thoughts, as well. What makes this first shift in point of view masterful is Russo’s slight of hand: nary are we aware of the shift before Miss Beryl has distracted us with her intelligent wit and eccentric charm: “There’s also a word in English, Miss Beryl had pointed out. Snail. Probably horse doo had a name in French also, but that didn’t mean God intended for you to eat it.” Shortly hereafter, we meet Sully, Miss Beryl’s tenant. Through Miss Beryl’s eyes we learn that Sully “…was a careless man… without ever meaning to be …And therefore dangerous.” We also witness Sully’s good-natured ribbing of his landlord. We learn that she was his eighth-grade teacher, he checks on her daily, he shovels her walk and he is her ally. We know all of this of him before, on page twenty-five, Russo again shifts the point of view to give us Sully from the inside out: “The first thing Sully saw when he stepped outside….” The remaining story is told predominantly from the perspectives of these two characters, with the exception of the odd line or short paragraph told from the points of view of various minor characters. These sporadic shifts in points of view, generally, inform the reader of either Sully or Miss Beryl in a way that neither could for the other. For instance, Russo lends the point of view to Rub, Sully’s best friend, in order to cast a different light on Miss Beryl – one that neither Sully nor Miss Beryl could accurately shed, but one that is truer to the town’s impression of her: “Whenever Rub saw her, his eyes got small and hard, his voice edgy and scared, as if he imagined that Miss Beryl were still capable of wielding absolute power over him.” This image of Miss Beryl becomes crucial to the reader’s understanding of her personal conflict and her relationship with her son. Russo’s expertly crafted shifts in points of view lend the reader an understanding of the story’s characters and their relationships, and, while it is the characters and relationships that sit at the heart of this story, it is also the people and relationships that sit at the heart of any town. In laying his characters and their relationships bare from multiple view points, Russo lays bare the town of Bath, and small town America.
I read the last chapter of this novel carefully, savoring each word, not wanting it to end. Not wanting it to end badly, either. But Russo comes through. What a big, bawdy, satisfying book this is. Our protagonist is Don Sullivan, "Sully" to his friends, a 60-year-old ne'er-do-well handyman (played by Paul Newman in the movie, which I haven't seen) in a struggling, blue collar town in upstate New York. Sully drinks too much, takes too many pills slipped under the table by the local pharmacist to treat a badly injured knee that Sully can't afford to have properly repaired, and in general has lived life against the grain of everyone's expectations, beginning as a high school football star who failed to live up to his promise some four decades or so before our story begins.But Sully has some saving graces. Namely, he has a talent for making everyone he comes in contact with feel good. Indeed, the folk in North Bath, New York, have come to depend on Sully's undependability, and therein lies the rub in this novel. He can't change. We don't want him to. Yet he has to, for the sake of his son and grandson, at least. Comic scenes with wonderful dialogue and laugh-out-loud situations are balanced by pull-you-up-short flashbacks of how Sully got to be Sully. It's a tough book in many places, especially as Russo describes the bittersweet, generation-to-generation realities of father-son relationships, but the rewards are great.Russo's intentions are clear when he has local townspeople refer to Sully's work sidekick as Sancho. The assembled parties who are unhappy with our Quixote-like Sully at this particular juncture in his life comprise an entertaining array of local characters, including a neurotic ex-wife, a male colleague who will never admit to his deep Sully-crush, an employer who fancies himself the town Lothario, an attorney and drinking companion whose idea of a meal is three pickled eggs from the jar on the bar at the local hangout, and a son who has returned home from a college teaching job in West Virginia, tenure-free, fleeing a bad marriage and clearly on the same path to destruction as his father. Then there are the women in Sully's life, one of whom has a granddaughter, Two Shoes, whose scenes in this book are gut-wrenching and wise, to say the least. Step by step, Two Shoes carries us closer to the forgiving heart that is the core of the novel.Through it all, Russo's prose is sure-handed, seemingly effortless. He can pull back the layers of a relationship in a few deft, witty strokes, and his understanding of human nature is remarkable. What sets him apart is his fondness for his characters, even as he reveals their unhappiest truths. And his characterization of a modern-day Don Quixote is food for thought indeed.There are no tears or violins in the book's final scene, but there is hope for Sully and all the characters who love him, hate him, or both, and that is enough. I'm not sure I want to see the movie; I don't want to tamper with the vivid portrait Russo draws of a small American town on its last legs and the idiosyncratic characters who inhabit it--pickled eggs and all.
What do You think about Nobody's Fool (1994)?
Richard Russo is a god! Okay, well, maybe only a demigod, but he's a literary deity for sure. He's the only author I know of who can write a story where nothing much of anything happens and yet it's so enjoyable to read. He's created his own genre---"dying small towns in northeastern U.S." He creates the most vivid, real characters of any author I've read. He also has a sneaky, quirky sense of humor that I love.Nobody's Fool centers on Sully, a sixty-year-old lovable ne'er-do-well who can never quite seem to follow through on his good intentions. You can't help but love him, and the cast of odd characters surrounding him, as they blunder through their daily lives."You missed what you didn't have far more than you appreciated what you did have. It was for this reason he'd always felt that owning things was overrated. All you were doing was alleviating the disappointment of not owning them." "It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry reading and not know it."
—Jeanette "Astute Crabbist"
The main character of this book, Donald ‘Sully’ Sullivan, is a routinely careless man who left his wife and had almost nothing to do with raising his son. He’s had an affair with a married woman for twenty years, and he’s lusting after yet another man’s wife. Sully also drinks and gambles on a near daily basis. At one point in this book he pimp slaps a woman, and there's another part in which he engages in an act that probably meets the legal definition of animal cruelty. Sounds like a real bastard, doesn’t he? Actually, Sully is one of the most likable fiction characters I’ve read in some time, and most of the damage he inadvertently does to others is trumped by the amount he does to himself.In the blue collar town of North Bath in upstate New York, Sully is a 60 year old laborer with a bum knee that he injured on a job, but rather than follow the advice of his lawyer and everyone else he knows, Sully insists on returning to work rather than follow the legal course of trying to get full disability. Why? Even Sully couldn’t tell you, but his insistence on doing things his way rather than the smart way is a lifelong habit with him. The fact that this attitude has him perpetually broke with only a run-down pick-up truck to his name does nothing to hinder Sully’s commitment to turning left whenever someone tells him to go right.If he’s low on money then Sully is rich in friends. Or at least he has no shortage of people to bullshit and argue with as he makes his daily rounds of the coffee shop, OTB, and the local bar. As Sully tries to get back to work while coping with his wrecked knee, he bumps into his estranged son Peter and his family who are back in town for Thanksgiving. Events eventually force Sully to face that even though he’s spent a lifetime trying to avoid even the mildest form of personal responsibility that there are some times when it can’t be dodged any longer.I saw the movie version of this with Paul Newman several times over the years and liked it so much that I always meant to pick up the book but never got around to it. After checking out Russo’s Empire Falls and now this, I’m wishing I’d been reading him for a lot longer. Stories about small communities fallen on hard times are something he does exceedingly well in both, and while there are a lot of similarities between his fictional towns, he creates large vivid casts of characters with their individual histories and motivations that feel unique to each book. There’s also more than enough humor to keep the whole thing from becoming a boring slog about how hard life can be.Sully is a particularly great creation as a good natured slob with a self-destructive streak that he acknowledges even as he feels no particular urge to change. He’s smart enough to win most of the arguments he gets into, but still usually too stubborn to lose a battle to win a war. While he may bitch about how he’s spent his life working like a dog and yet doesn’t have to pot to piss in, there’s also a feeling of general contentment about Sully. As long as his truck starts and he can afford to bet his daily horse race and get a few beers at the bar, he really doesn’t feel like he needs much more.It’s a bit long and there are a few too many sub-plots for my taste. (The scaled down plot of the movie actually works better as a story.) It’s still a terrific book with a lead character that you can’t help but like even as you wish that he’d wise up just a little bit.
—Kemper
A few chapters into this book, I realized with joy that I had found a new author whose works I would enjoy tremendously. "Please let this not be his only book," I thought, and I was not disappointed.Once again, I find that it is the characters, more than plot or writing style, that make this one of my favorite books. (The plot and style are great too, though.) Unusual, lovable, flawed, and most of all hilariously WITTY!Maybe because it was my first Russo, this remains my favorite of his novels, but the others are still very good reads.
—Laura
