Customer Reviews

Nobody's Fool

5 star:		(79)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Richard Russo hasn't published very many books, but he is quickly becoming one of the great authors of today. In Nobody's Fool, he writes another excellent tale of small-town life, a setting he revisits in his masterpiece, Empire Falls.

The main character in Nobody's Fool is Donald Sullivan, known more commonly as Sully. Sully is something of a free spirit, rarely thinking beyond the moment; now that he's sixty, he's feeling the effects of his short-sightedness; he has many friends but few real relationships, even with his son and his off-and-on again lover. Indeed, the closest relationship he has is with his landlady.

It's hard to describe this novel in terms of plot, since this is more a book about characters than a regular story. Russo is not interested in the standard beginning-middle-end structure of a novel; instead this book is almost pure middle. Plenty happens, but as in real life, few things are neatly resolved.

Russo is a brilliant writer and makes all his characters multi-dimensional. There are no good guys or bad guys here; even Sully, a likeable enough fellow, has some definite flaws. The way all these characters interact - Sully, his landlady Miss Beryl, his friend/worshipper Rub, his foe/friend Carl and the dozen or so others - is what makes this book so much fun. There is humor here, but this is not a comic novel; instead, it is a novel that does not fit well into any category.

For those whose tastes run beyond strict genre fiction, this is definitely a reccomended read. It just one indication of what a great writer Russo is.

Thank God for Amazon. I discovered Richard Russo while looking at reviews of Moo by Jane Smiley. A reviewer put me onto Straight Man, and that's how I got to Nobody's Fool.

I liked Straight Man very much. Then I went on to The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool, which I read within a few months of each other about a year ago. Looking back it's hard to separate the two because of their similar setting and characters.

Both are wonderful. If there is the perfect novel, both The Risk Pool and Nobody's Fool are it. One night while I was reading Nobody's Fool in bed, I finished a paragraph and put the book down on my chest thinking that I had actually been touched by God; it was that unusual. I felt that I had experienced perfection. That has only happened to me once before.

Russo's chracters are "ordinary;" some would call them losers. Russo clearly loves them, and that is the wonder of these two books. When I tried to describe Russo's writing to an author friend, she said that a good writer leads his readers by the hand, but she said it sounded in this case as if Russo were leading his readers by the soul. I couldn't have said it better.

Please read this book.

When is the rest of the country going to catch on to the numerous qualities of Russo's writing? If the reviews of his books here on Amazon are any indication, he is slowly but surely gaining fans every time someone picks up one of his books.

I picked up a copy of Straight Man at a bargain rack a while back, and to this day that book remains one of my favorite contemporary novels of all time. It pokes fun of academia, political correctness, family turmoil and greed with humor and compassion.

Nobody's Fool comes in a close second. I absolutely loved the character Sully, the principled loser and antihero of the novel who seems to keep begrudgingly doing the right thing and doing his best to maintain order in a chaotic town. His idiotic but loyal sidekick, Rub, is a perfect comic foil, and the scenes of them scheming to make a few bucks are outright hilarious. Every character in the novel, from Sully's old landlady and her busybody friends to the humorless bartender and the familiar group of losers at Sully's numerous stomping grounds, are dead on accurate and believable. Russo writes the best dialogue of any modern writer I know.

The book, like most of Russo's fiction, peels back the layers of a small town in upstate New York, a town that somehow missed out on prosperity when the interstate drew travelers away, but Russo writes about the town and its inhabitants with humor and compassion. This is not the stark, depressing realism of a Russell Banks novel like Affliction. You will laugh out loud at Sully's shameful flirtations, and at Rub's considerable problems at home with his perpetually angry wife, while recognizing the truth in Russo's small town mosaic. Read Nobody's Fool and Straight Man, and you will be a Russo fan for life.

My first exposure to Richard Russo came via the movies. Specifically, the film rendition of 'Nobody's Fool' (I cannot resist anything featuring Paul Newman). I fell in love with the film, and all of its quirky, lovable characters, and debated for quite a while before picking up the book. Would reading it tarnish the esteem in which I held the movie? Film versions of books are notoriously horrid ('The Princess Bride' is a notable exception). Would I end up wishing I had never read the cursed manuscript?

Oh no. Emphatically no. This is a wonderful book, full of lyricism, real people, and the engaging, bittersweet story I have to come to expect from Mr. Russo. His painting of small-town New England life is full of colorful details and a clarity that reminds me of Hemingway, although I never felt as drawn to any of Hemingway's characters as I do to those in 'Nobody's Fool.' The reluctant protagonist, Donald Sullivan ('Sully'), is both irresistable and infuriating. His ridiculously comic best friend Rub and his perpetually optimistic land-lady Miss Beryl are on-the-money portaits of genuine people. The interplay between Sully and his sometimes-boss, all-the-time nemesis Carl is worth the read alone. As is typical with film versions of books, the book is a good deal deeper, and darker, than the movie. The descriptions of Sully's childhood growing up with an abusive parent have stayed with me, although in no way do they resort to grisly details to pack their punch.

The book and the film are different entities; two separate and excellent pieces of work. I have not read all of Mr. Russo's works, but a good number of them, and 'Nobody's Fool' is still my favorite. You will laugh out loud at Sully's antics, fall in love with the characters, and marvel and the fine writing in this book.

The setting is vintage Russo. A small, depressed town that time forgot where people tend to go through the motions of life, clinging to the hope of an economic miracle that never seems to happen. A coworker told me that this is the real America, there are more towns like this than there are the bustling big cities. Russo's towns come to life with his vivid descriptions and three dimensional characters.

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.

This a wonderful book. It will have you smiling, laughing, and concerned with the lives and events of a place that might otherwise be seen as of little worth.

Anyone who has driven through the secondary roads of Northern New York will recognize the book's breathtaking authenticity. This is the land of rusting cars sitting on blocks in front yards, old farm houses slumped over and left unpainted for decades, and ugly roadside beer joints with neon window signs.

The town at the center of the story is a place, once somewhat grand, now for years in serious decline. Charm can be spotted in the decayed gingerbread woodwork of century-old houses whose residents are too poor or old to keep them up. Some huge old trees give parts of the main street a disguise of faded elegance.

The town might be taken as a metaphor for the main character, Sully, who is slowly rotting into the same fabric of decay. Sully is charming, offensive, funny, and pathetic in turns. He is both biting observer of the town's slide into oblivion and full participant.

Sully is a complex human being, and surely one of the most memorable characters in modern American literature. He is actually one of a number of attempts by Richard Russo to come to terms with the man who was his extraordinary father. Most of these attempts have not been as appealing or successful as Nobody's Fool, the only exception being The Risk Pool, another fine book, where his central character is a boy thrown by circumstances into the bizarre, chaotic life of his father, a much rawer character than Sully.

Russo has the gift to hold a place up to laughter while yet never separating himself from what he is having us laugh at. It is that quality that gives grace to a story that could fall into brutal sarcasm.

The film that was made of this book was the kind of fine little film Hollywood just does not make anymore. It was a terrific role for an older Paul Newman, and, if you saw it, I think you will find yourself hearing his voice and intonations sometimes as you read Sully's lines.

But the book is far richer and more interesting than the film. It is quite simply a modern masterpiece.

Nobody's Fool was the first Richard Russo book I ever read, and it made me want to read more. It's about a 50-something laborer named Sully, who seems to court disaster at every turn but somehow perserveres. Like other Russo novels, not a heck of a lot seems to happen, yet the enjoyment is in the character development, and the unfashionable setting, usually a blue collar small town in upstate New York. From his somewhat shady employer, to his elderly landlady, his unkempt and dizzy sidekick, and the old flame who is still in the picture, the characters make the book. Nobody's Fool is a relaxing and amusing page turner that draws the reader in. Maybe one day I'll watch the movie, as I wasn't even aware there was one when I read this.

This was the last (out of 4) books by Richard Russo I've read, and it's difficult which to say which one is best, but it's probably a close race between 'Nobody's Fool' and 'The Risk Pool' - but 'Straight Man' and 'Mohawk' are great too! As someone else said, Russo's character development ranks up there with Anne Tyler, if indeed he's not even better. 'Nobody's Fool' is peopled with all kinds of great and interesting characters. For such an 'ordinary guy', Sully is pretty complex,

actually. Rub and Hattie are hoots, Sully's landlady is wonderful, and the list goes on. The movie is pretty good too, but as usual, the book is better - it's hard to get much of a 550-page book into a movie! Buy this book.

NOBODY'S FOOL by Richard Russo

NOBODY'S FOOL was my introduction to the writing of Richard Russo, who won the Pulitzer prize for his book, EMPIRE FALLS. In NOBODY'S FOOL, we find ourselves immersed in the small town life of Bath, located in the Northeastern corner of the United States. Sully (Donald Sullivan) and all the other quirky characters that fill this novel made it the most interesting read I've had this year so far.

Sully's life has no purpose. He drifts through life, doing what he feels at that point in time. He lives in a very modest apartment that is barely furnished, and spends most of his time either at Hattie's restaurant, the bar, or betting on the race tracks. He gets the odd job here and there, mostly doing physical type of labor such as helping someone build a house. This may sound mundane, but it's not. Not when Sully is behind it. He can make the simplest task an outrageous event. If there is some news in town that sounds almost too weird to be true, Sully is often behind it.

Sully's sidekick is a simpleton named Rub. He's short, and is the joke of the town. But for some reason Sully likes having him around, especially when he feels like making fun of someone. Rub sticks to Sully like white on rice, and it also appears that Rub is in love with Sully, but not in THAT way of course, as anyone could tell you. Just a lot of idol worship, that's what seems to be emanating out of Rub.

Sully's life is intertwined with his landlady, Miss Beryl, who was once one of his grade school teachers. Now, they are both in their golden years. Their history is complicated. A lot of Sully is wrapped up in Miss Beryl's family, a complex series of relationships and events that caused her son Clive Jr. to hate Sully with a passion. A rivalry that Sully is not even aware of exists between the two men, and it stems from a childhood that both Clive and Sully shared.

Miss Beryl's days are spent talking to her dead husband Clive Sr. and a mask she calls Drivers Ed, which is another quirky story that fits the theme of this book. All the characters in NOBODY'S FOOL are not quite normal. Or maybe they are, but they seem to have little quirks that the average person would think rather unusual. The charm of this novel is not the story, but the odd people that reside in this small town of Bath. I found myself chuckling quite often, and at the same time I found the person that was Sully a fascinating character study. His life story is told in bits and pieces, from his childhood and dysfunctional relationship with his father, to his first marriage and his neglect for his own son Peter.

As one reads this book, it may be difficult to find the point of the story. But there is a point. There are various points to NOBODY'S FOOL, but I felt the most important moral to this story was acceptance, and the courage to move on. A lot goes on in NOBODY'S FOOL, and it may take some patience to get through the book. But I found it easy reading, although slow, because it's not a beach read, but it is a book in which one will remember the characters for a very long time. NOBODY'S FOOL will most likely appear on my top 20 books of 2003.

This book tells the story of a 60-year-old ne're-do-well who goes by the name of Sully. Sully does odd construction jobs in a small town in upstate New York, the very town where he grew up. His childhood friends, ex-wife, and high school flames all live in town, and in this story, he continues to annoy them as he always has. The town is slowing changing, though, and Sully with it. Sully certainly doesn't want to change, but between a knee injury that makes continuing his construction work dubious, an aging landlady, and the return of his son, whose marriage is failing, Sully reluctantly begins to admit that he's going to have to make some adjustments to the status quo.

I've run across Sully and his friends in my travels. Cranky, hypocritical, tough, and tender, they are the perpetrators of some of the funniest antics of family oral histories--that is, as long as you weren't on the receiving end of their ire at the time. You'll get a few laughs out of this book for sure, and it may even strike home.