By Paul Carrier
With the recent release of Everybody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, I figured it was time to do what I should have done a long time ago and crack open Nobody’s Fool, the novel in which Donald “Sully” Sullivan first emerged as a lovable loser.
A 60-year-old native of North Bath in upstate New York, Sully is a divorced father who’s estranged from his ex-wife and their son, Peter. Saddled with a bum knee, he rents an apartment from Miss Beryl, a local widow who was his teacher back in the eighth grade; shares occasional odd jobs with his dim-witted pal, Rub Squeers; and carries on a halfhearted affair with a married woman.
Sully’s a smart guy — nobody’s fool is the local assessment — but he’s also “a case study underachiever” who has spent his life making bad choices. He’s witty, good-natured and insightful, but irresponsible as well. A contractor who employs him from time time describes him as a compass that always points south.
In other words, a likable but not always admirable blue-collar archetype who figures if you’ve been dealt a bad hand you shouldn’t take the game too seriously.
Pigheaded and prone to self-destructive “stupid streaks,” Sully nonetheless finds himself blessed with a certain equilibrium that allows him to stumble through life with relative ease.
But all that begins to change when Peter, a married college professor and the father of three children, reenters Sully’s life after years of estrangement dating back to Peter’s childhood, when Sully ignored his son as much as possible.
Russo’s lengthy novel —549 pages in paperback — is lively and humorous. It's full of quirky but realistic characters, and page after page of snappy dialogue, much of it laugh-out-loud funny. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author turns a fond, understanding eye on the denizens of this down-on-its-luck small town, transforming the town itself into a recognizable character of sorts.
Take the White Horse Tavern, for example. In Sully’s lifetime, “The Horse” has gone from “a classy watering hole for the Albany young and well-to-do, a summer haunt of well-dressed New Yorkers . . . to a shabby local restaurant/pub” that caters to a sad collection of locals most of the year.
Once a tourist hot spot thanks to its mineral springs, North Bath never recovered after the waters dried up and the town’s resort hotel burned down. Now the struggling community is banking on a rebuilt hotel, a newly discovered spring and the planned construction of a dubious theme park to revive its glory days, or at least some feeble semblance of them.
Although there’s comic relief aplenty in Nobody’s Fool, Russo isn’t really playing for laughs.
Sully, his son, his ex, his boss, his landlady, his pal Rub, his one-legged lawyer Wirf — each is an all-too-believable person displaying myriad idiosyncrasies and, in most cases, carrying plenty of emotional baggage. Several of the characters are not very self-aware, which reflects the human condition as we often find it in the real world.
Russo delves into the backstories, the life histories, of the major characters. In the process, he explores their psyches in satisfying detail, as assorted childhood traumas, troubled marriages, misguided affairs and parental shortcomings underscore the complexities and contradictions of all of our lives.
In the end, we come to appreciate that Donald “Sully” Sullivan really is nobody’s fool, despite his occasionally explosive temper and frequently impulsive decisions. In fact, Sully proves to be a far more admirable person, in his own flawed way, than do other seemingly more respectable residents of North Bath.
