Richard Russo has
penned another novel which adds to the ten excellent books in his
portfolio. His latest, Everybody’s Fool, is a sequel to Nobody’s Fool. For this novel he returns to the town Old
Bath in upstate New York. Lots of
familiar characters have aged since then – some gracefully, others not so much
– and of course, the competition with the nearby town of Schuyler Springs
continues, even though Old Bath is lagging further and further behind. Sully, Miss Beryl, the English teacher,
Clive, Carl, Rub, Clarice, and Bootsie are all welcome parts of his eleventh
novel.
Russo is a novelist,
short story writer, screenwriter, and teacher.
He was born in Johnstown, NY in 1949.
Nobody’s Fool has made its way
to the big screen starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, and Jessica Tandy, which
garnered two Oscar nominations and a half-dozen other awards. I suspect Everybody’s
Fool might follow that same path considering a glowing review from The Houston Chronicle. My favorite of his novels is Straight Man, and I would surely love to
see that come to film.
One of the more
interesting characters is Sully. He
served, and was wounded, in World War II.
Russo writes, “…he hadn’t been sure then and still wasn’t now, even
after the VA diagnosis. Had he gotten
off easy? During the war he’d somehow
managed to be standing in the exact right place while more talented men and
better soldiers happened to be standing in the exact wrong one. Often, that was right next to Sully. For a while there on Omaha Beach there’d been
a new, utterly lethal lottery every few seconds. Through diligence and judgment and skill you
could improve your odds of survival, but not by much. All the way to Berlin, the calculus of pure
dumb luck had ruled, Sully its undeniable beneficiary. // But that had been
war. When the shooting finally stopped
and the world returned to something like sanity and he again had the leisure to
reflect, things felt different” (58). The
boom which followed the end of the war never quite made it to Old Bath. Corrupt contractors, con men, and criminals
all contributed to the towns decline.
One of the more
interesting characters is Chief of Police Raymer. He has recently lost his wife to cancer, and
he wallows in self-pity all the while obsessing over a garage door remote he
found in his wife’s car. Despite threats
from the Mayor, he jeopardizes his job by trying to locate the matching garage. He is convinced his wife planned on leaving
him. Russo writes, “Raymer recognized
Rub Squeers, Sully’s sidekick, sitting in the small patch of shade […]. Something about his posture suggested that he
was weeping. Could he be? Was he, too remembering a loved one buried
nearby? Was he too, yearning for a new life,
a new line of work? Maybe he’d like to
swap jobs, Raymer thought, because digging graves, compared with law
enforcement, would be both peaceful and rewarding. The dead were past being troubled by the
world’s injustice. Nor did they resist
order. You could lay them out on a grid
by the thousands without a single complaint.
Try that on the living and see where it got you” (67). I do not want to give the impression this novel
is morbid. Plenty of humorous moments
occur, along with some suspense, while Raymer tries to track down an ex-convict
bent on revenge with a hit list.
I read Nobody’s Fool in the 90s, and found Everybody’s Fool even better. I think it might be interesting to re-read
these two novels one after the other for a more complete picture of Richard
Russo’s outstanding talent as a novelist.
5 Stars.
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