Synopses & Reviews
Richard Russo's slyly funny and moving new novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years.
Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool is storytelling at its most generous.
Review
"Set in the economically desperate ex-resort town of North Bath, N.Y., Russo's novel displays his characteristic verbal panache and biting wit." Publishers Weekly
Review
"Russo is a master craftsman....The blue-collar heartache at the center of [his] fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving....Nobody's Fool is a big, rambunctious novel with endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness." The Boston Globe
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"Remarkable....Like all the best fiction, [Nobody's Fool] is a revelation of the human heart." Washington Post Book World
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"Simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated, Richard Russo's confident, assured novel sweeps the reader up in the daily life of its characters." San Francisco Chronicle
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"The fun of this novel is in hearing these guys (and women) talk...they're funny, quick and inventive. The novel's tone has the same...intelligence as its characters." The New York Times Book Review
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"Reading this large, comfortable, good-natured novel...feels great....[It] teems with local characters...richly conceived and drawn so lovingly that you can't help but like them." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"[Sully is] reminiscent, in a way, of Bellow's old men....One never tires of watching him, because he has the capacity to make everyone around him feel better, including the reader." The New Yorker
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"Few novelists plow this soil with more even-handed ease and naturalness than Russo....He demonstrates a rare ability to find affection for even his most empty [characters] while questioning the choices of those he most values....His success in keeping us involved is especially impressive." Chicago Sun-Times
Review
"Nobody's Fool is a giant hard-edged comedy, a Flannery O'Connor story taken north and gone ballistic....Russo's smart prose gives Sully's, and everyone else's, dim prospects a witty, allegorical weight." Mirabella
Review
"As he demonstrated in Mohawk and The Risk Pool, Russo knows the small towns of upstate New York and the people who inhabit them; he writes with humor and compassion. A delight." Library Journal
Synopsis
This slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York and in the life of Sully, of one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years is a classic American story.
Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs, Nobody's Fool, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous.
Nobody s Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith."
Synopsis
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls, this slyly funny, moving novel about a blue-collar town in upstate New York--and in the life of Sully, of one of its unluckiest citizens, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years--is a classic American story.
Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps. With its uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity's follies as well as its triumphs,
Nobody's Fool, from Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Richard Russo, is storytelling at its most generous.
Nobody's Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and Melody Griffith.
Look for Everybody's Fool, available now, and Somebody's Fool, coming in July '23.
Synopsis
In his slyly funny and moving novel, the author of The Risk Pool follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens.
Synopsis
In his slyly funny and moving new novel, the author of The Risk Pool follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat, upstate New York town--and in the lives of the unluckiest of its citizens. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Paul Newman, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith, and Jessica Tandy. Author reading tour.
About the Author
Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobodys Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls (which won the Pulitzer Prize) and a collection of stories, The Whore's Child.
Reading Group Guide
1. This novel's title,
Nobody's Fool, is a punning reference to its protagonist, Donald Sullivan, who at age 60 is "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 confuse[s] with independence." Why is Sully so insistent on remaining nobody's fool? How has this determination affected his relationships with other people?
2. One consequence of Sully's prickly autonomy is his tendency to go off on "stupid streaks." Is Sully a stupid man? How would you evaluate a freedom whose defining characteristic seems to be the freedom to do the wrong thing at the wrong time?
3. From the beginning we know that Sully has a bad knee, and his refusal to treat--or even favor--it generates many of the novel's complications. In what ways does this injury resonate with the novel's themes?
4. Sully's string of misfortunes may also be due to bad luck or malign predestination. Is he destined to be unlucky? To what extent are his actions and character predetermined?
5. Sully's father brutalized him as a child. Sully deserted his son, Peter. Peter abandoned his timid eldest son, Will, to the mercies of his sociopathic little brother. What causes does the author posit for this four-generation history of cruelty and neglect?
6. Perhaps to compensate for Sully's brutal father, Russo supplies Sully with a very good, if somewhat sharp-tongued, surrogate mother, Beryl Peoples. She may, in fact, be the most real and enduring attachment Sully has. How does their relationship compare with Beryl's relationship with her real son, Clive, Jr.? How is the antagonism between Clive and Sully an extension of their childhood rivalry for the affections of Beryl's late husband?
7. How would you characterize Russo's portrayal of relations between the sexes, and why are most of his characters divorced, widowed, or unhappily married?
8. The sudden flashes of good luck (or simple happiness) that illuminate Sully's life and the lives of other characters may be attributable to grace, which The Random House Dictionary of the English Language defines as "the influence or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them." At what moments does grace seem to operate in this novel?
9. Nobody's Fool is also a novel about a town, North Bath, New York, whose misfortunes, like Sully's, may be due to collective stupidity or fate. Even North Bath's venerable elms now constitute a threat to its communal life and property. In what ways do the novel's principal locales--Hattie's, the OTB, and the White Horse--function as a microcosm of the town as a whole? To what extent are North Bath's decline and grandiose visions of renewal symptomatic of the political and economic climate of America in the 1980s?
10. What role does class play in this novel? To what extent are its characters shaped by economic circumstances?
11. One critic has described Nobody's Fool as "a sad novel camouflaged in comedy." How is this true? What is the nature of the book's sadness? How does Russo balance his comic and tragic impulses?
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. We hope that they will provide you with different ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel whose size, opulence of character and description, broad social canvas, and sheer narrative zest suggest the books of Dickens, John Irving, and Anne Tyler. Amid the whip-crack repartee and wildly proliferating subplots, readers will also discover a serious exploration of the sometimes nourishing, sometimes strangling ties between fathers and sons; a bittersweet homage to America's obsolescing small towns, and a ruefully wise take on what earlier writers called predestination and grace and what Russo's characters experience as plain dumb luck.