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Summary: Life's tough when your best friend is your 80yo landlady
Review: Sixty-year-old Sully is headed for a stretch of bad luck, and he knows it. Broke, unable to work due to an arthritic broken knee, estranged from his family, a wacko ex-wife, and a pissed-off lover, Sully can't see a way out. But his biggest problem is the memory of his childhood overshadowed by his drunken and abusive father. Like most of Russo's books, Nobody's Fool is set in a small and fading industrial town of upstate New York, and as usual, he displays compassion for his characters, spiced with his inimitable sense of humor.
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Summary: Coming Away Empty
Review: This novel follows largely the same pattern as Russo's other books, "The Risk Pool", "Empire Falls", and probably "Mohawk" (which I haven't read yet). Only in this case, the main character, Donald "Sully" Sullivan is both the son of and a neglectful parent. The novel follows Sully's ups and downs in the small, crumbling town of (North) Bath until it grinds to a halt after 549 pages.The characters are likeable (or unlikeable) enough and the writing is sharp enough. The problem I have is that there's no conflict resolution, to pretty much anything. Everyone lives Unhappily Ever After, but if the point is that life doesn't work out the way we want it to...didn't I already know that going in? Do I need a novel, albeit an entertaining, well-written one, to tell me the obvious? The point of introducing conflict, in my mind, is to resolve said conflict or conflicts within the span of the novel. By not doing so, how has the reader benefitted? Although I will say that I'd rather have a nonending over the cheezy tacked-on ending to "Empire Falls". And now my point, to end this discussion, is that while the lack of a real ending ticks me off, I enjoyed this book a lot. I'd recommend reading it, but you too may be disappointed it didn't go the distance.
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Summary: Gotta Love Him
Review: My introduction to Richard Russo came through the film version of Nobody's Fool. Enchanted as I was with the film, the book absolutely enveloped me. While I could never shake Paul Newman as the protagonist, Sully, the rest of the cast of characters- and these are characters as only Russo can build them- defy depiction. Nobody's Fool is alive with so many vivid personalites, the reader feels as if he has always lived in small town, terminally dull Bath, NY. Sully says the witty things we mortals think of only after it's too late to say them. He drinks too much, cares too much and does all the things in excess we are all cautioned not to do. Gotta love him.
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Summary: Sully is not terribly likeable
Review: This novel was written well enough. My only real problem with it was that I couldn't relate in any way to the main character, and I'm doubtful that most literate people could. I wanted to like him, but he's a lazy man who doesn't take care of himself and throughout the progression of the book, he shows no improvement. It made it a little hard to care what happened to him enough to keep reading. Other characters were far more interesting (like the main character's landlady). I would've been interested to hear more from them instead.
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Summary: As good as an Ann Tyler
Review: This is an interesting, fun, endearing book. The protagonist is Sully, a feckless 60 year old, a well liked if easy to antagonize citizen of a small town. He is very principled, but also very immature. Of the many well developed secondary characters, Sully's landlord, an 80 year old, widowed school teacher, and his ex-wife are done particularly well. Like an Ann Tyler, Russo does not need much in terms of plot, concentrating on character, relationships and dialogue, leavened by warmth, wit and humor. Toward the end there is a lot of plot development, but in my mind it is not intrinsic to the novel.
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Summary: Russo's one of the best we've got
Review: A wonderful example of craftsmanship, storytelling, and narrative force. Russo writes painfully real characters, gives them faults and quirks which are irresistible to the reader. Nobody's Fool is one of those books you hear about but rarely come across.
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Summary: Awesome!
Review: My all-time favorite novel. Laugh-out-loud funny.
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Summary: An American Clasic
Review: Richard Russo could well be the finest literary figure writing today. He is certainly on a par with E.B. White, Mark Twain, and Shirley Jackson. His work allows us to understand characters and settings as though we are living them ourselves. By the time you've reached the end of "Nobody's Fool" the central character, Donald Sullivan, is a best friend. Each and every thought he has is one which has crossed our own mind at one time or other. Russo's ability to capture the dismal essence of Central New York State in mid-winter is splendid and anyone who has experienced a winter there will know for certain that Russo writes with an honesty and with an ability to put into words what we all feel but can't express.
Russo, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist for "Empire Falls", is a man who has created a small but impressive collection of books, all of which will become American Classics. For those people who wish to sink into a book and live in another world, his books are a gem. For those people who wish to study the craft of writing, there is no finer writer alive today who can set the bar of standards for us.
"Nobody's Fool" captures us from the start and we are able to find peace in his writing. This is abook to be owned and those of you who will borrow it will no doubt seek to add it to your own library. "Nobody's Fool" is a rare book in that re-reading it will allow deeper insight each time.
Richard Russo has created a masterpiece.
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Summary: Everybodys Soul
Review: Richard Russo packs a whole 'lotta livin' between the covers of this raucous trip through a small upstate New York town. Donald Sullivan aka Sully provides the core around which this novel is wound and Russo manages to keep you interested in Sullys adventures well beyond the final page. You will find yourself wishing for more after this enjoyable read. What Russo accomplishes is to paint a portrait so clear you swear you have known these characters all your life, and perhaps you have. For what you have here is a story of relationships:of parents and children, fathers and sons, freind to freind, and husbands and lovers. Sullys quest is to get over a rotten upbringing by a bully whose tyranny is so complete he can't escape it long after his fathers death. It permeates Sullys relationship with his estranged wife, his freind Rub,a woman he's been carrying on an affair with for fifteen years, and most of all his son who he has barely seen since he was one year old even though when Sully left his family he only moved seven blocks away. Everyone in town loves Sully, few want to have much to do with him and the feeling is mutual. The only exception is Miss Beryl, Sullys eighth grade English teacher from whom he rents an upper flat, and whose own son he seems to have replaced in the old womans heart. What makes this story so compelling is the way the characters are drawn from real life and how fully developed Russo manages to make them. You can see the sweaty bottles of beer sitting before them on the bars and dining room tables and see the rings they leave when lifted to drink. You have owned vehicles, or know someone who has owned one like Sully invariably gets stuck with, and you can feel the warmth and take in the scents of bars, diners, the OTB, or donut shops against the snowy cold of winter as these characters move through them on their wayward journey into your heart. When you consider Russo's overall body of work you get the feeling this author is writing from experience for the longing for a father is a persistent theme and the colorfully drawn characters and wry humor barely hide the pathos of these hard living characters. If there is anything negative about this novel it is the authors bitterness with fathers who for whatever reason do not properly fulfill their responsibilities to their families, but you will have to look pretty hard to find it. You will laugh out loud, curse the stupidities, and revel in minor victories, but you will not want to pass on this one.
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Summary: Another classic by Russo
Review: 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.
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