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Summary: Laugh out loud at midnight !
Review: This book kept not only me but my boyfriend laughing out loud. Russo's colorful development of a multiude of characters has left me wanting more. It has also left me disappointed in other books since I read his! I felt like these people were part of my life and I didn't want the book to end. There is not one wasted word or character in this book. It will definitely give you something to think about the next time you drive or pass through small-town America. All is not as quiet and peaceful as it may seem! Even in a "quiet" little town, there is enough drama for everyone. I am hooked on Russo's writing!
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Summary: A good start to my Russo reading
Review: 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.
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Summary: Russo's Best (so far)
Review: 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.
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Summary: # 2
Review: First it was The Risk Pool, now this book.
These books are truly wonderful and now onto to all the rest.Why this author is not an instant number one best seller is the biggest mystery in the history of the publishing world. I'm just finding out he wins Pulitzer prizes. No shock to me. god bless him. He's my new John Irving.
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Summary: Russo is a master of the "small town" novel.
Review: The Small Town usually looks-to those of us who usually only see them as we drive by/through their confines-like a stagnant, static environment where nothing much happens very slowly. Richard Russo's unique gift is to show-with humor, insight and a healthy helping of pathos-the dynamic, often desperate nature of life as it is lived within the outwardly bucolic confines of the small town. Small town scenes have always been fertile fictional ground. Why? They present manageable little pressure cookers with a fixed cast of characters, whose lack of privacy and enforced proximity may cause the plot to boil over. Nobody's fool is Russo's third small town upstate New York tale after Mohawk and the extraordinary Risk Pool. "Nobody's Fool," is set in North Bath, N.Y., a fractionally less blighted version of the blue-collar dead end where his earlier novels, "Mohawk" and "The Risk Pool," take place. What's turned up the heat in North Bath is the possibility that a theme park, to be called the Ultimate Escape, may be built there, and may breathe some economic life into the moribund former spa. Once a thriving resort, the town has declined steadily since 1868, "when the unthinkable began to happen and the various mineral springs, one by one, without warning or apparent reason, began, like luck, to dry up, and with them the town's wealth and future." Donald Sullivan-Sully to the inhabitants of North Bath-is the novel's incorrigible and engaging hero. Says Russo in the book: "Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully -- people still remarked -- was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application -- that at 60, he was 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 confused with independence." Sixty years have knocked Sully from one part of North Bath to another, from his violent father's house to the rooms he rents now from the elderly Miss Beryl Peoples, his former teacher. A painful knee injury has him working odd jobs, off the books.
Sully is a partly domesticated, slightly maddened bear, feinting and jabbing at the center of the book's many subplots and hard-luck characters. His estranged lover, Ruth, has a husband she despises and a daughter whose own husband is trying to kill her. Sully's son, Peter, has serious marital troubles, two difficult children, a crazily possessive mother, a sick stepfather -- and he's been denied tenure at the small college where he teaches. Miss Beryl has been getting lost on her excursions around town, and she is compelled to fend off the grabby, selfish meddling of her banker son, Clive Jr. -- one of the main boosters of the Ultimate Escape. Even Sully's best friend, Rub (he's too dim to find trouble to get into), is undone by his wife's late-blooming kleptomania. As with all Russo's novels, knowing the outline of the story utterly fails to convey the complexities and emotional quagmires that the story involves. These are deep textured, richly woven stories that Russo writes. To read one of these books is more like to move into town-you are left with the sense that you're not reading this, you're living it. This is definitely the case with Nobody's Fool. I personally consider Russo one of our greatest living writers. This book is classic Russo, the type of work that fully works to establish his exalted position.
This is not a novel to be missed.
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Summary: long, but not long enough
Review: Because you wish this story could go on forever. Even the movie (though not perfect) based on this book is great, because the book is so outstanding. Russo writes so well you feel like you know these characters better than you do your own neighbors. That's how genuinely real,complex and amazingly loving or weird or pityful they are. Read all of Russo, but especially this one.
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Summary: nobody's fool
Review: Richard Russo is a genius. He rates with Drieser,Twain,and Sinclair Lewis as a Modern American genius. I have a hard time tolerating his reviews, The constant reference to his setings, the social class of his characters, ect. are so off the mark of his universal truths about human character and community. I am a serious and avid reader. Richard Russo is an underappreciated artist that,to me, is as deep as Dostoevsky.
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Summary: Russo at his best dealing with a blue collar "never was"
Review: This is certainly Mr. Russo at his best. I have re-read this book many times. The characters are clear and outrageous without resorting the the insane qualities that we often see in contemporary "southern" works. Russo's setting is a failed small town of northern New York State. Not quite close enough to the Adirondaks to be rustic, this town is simply standing after having taken 100 years of "one, two punches" on the economic front. How these poeple survive is never very clear, but off track betting and little games of chance in the back room of a bar seem to be the only time money is exchanged. Russo's lead character is a decent sort who got dealt a terrible upbringing, something that he never could get out from under. He tries to be a lover, a father and a grandfather and a friend and a tenant and a worker. It all is wonderfully funny and very clearly REAL... in the sense that I am sure such a person exists, somewhere. Russo has the oddest ability to understand the motivations, secret urges of females. He is deft with the banker's "fiance" in understanding that she mourns the looks she left behind when she became middle aged. His elderly land lady is less convincing, but his other women are superb... including Vera-the barely keeping it together ex-wife-and the the lead character's tired, not-even-part-time lover. Buy this book and read it. You won't regret it.
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Summary: Enjoy and Laugh Out Loud
Review: Straight Man is truly one of the most enjoyable reads I've enjoyed in years. Other reviews have commented on the basic plot structure, but I want to particularly stress Russo's wonderful command of the turned phrase. Like Groucho Marx, "Lucky Hank" is this perfectly anarchistic loose cannon that we all wish were part of our social circles.
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Summary: No fooling-read this
Review: Richard Russo is known for his flawed but engaging characters, and he brings the theme home in this one. Sully-alcoholic n'er-do-well, divorced, with limited fathering skills to his grown son, has more redeeming qualities than flaws. However, they both keep multiplying throughout the book. Russo manages to inject exrtaordinary realism and humor into his stories so that you can smell the coffee in the diner, see the grit of the dying small towns, and laugh as you recognize a few people you know among the players. I recommend this and all his works for their humor and heart-with the exception of Mohawk, having no humor, but still worthy of praise. Can't wait to read his next one.
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