PattyMacDotComma's Reviews > Nobody's Fool

5+★
“‘Hurrying isn’t what I do best, at least first thing in the morning,’ Sully reminded her, putting some weight on the knee, which belted out a hearty hello.”

A new favourite! Well, new to me, not to the Pulitzer Prize people and the millions of readers around the world. Sometimes, the Pulitzer gets it right. :)

Anyone with a banged-up knee will instantly understand the significance of the “hearty hello” that starts the day. Donald Sullivan, Sully, is a banged-up, 60-year-old labourer who’s supposed to be taking classes at a Community College while he awaits the final outcome of his disability case. He lives in the upstairs flat of his widowed eighth-grade teacher, Mrs. Peoples/aka Miss Beryl in Bath, a small town in upstate New York. [Eighth graders in the US are about 14-15 years old. Kings of the little kids, butt of all jokes for the big kids. In some countries, they attend separate schools, but I digress.]

Miss Beryl has just spotted Old Hattie running down the middle of the wintry road in her nighty, fleeing for freedom from the booth at her old restaurant where she spends her days under her daughter’s watchful eye. Fleeing is her intent, shuffling is her speed, so Sully has no trouble heading her back to Hattie’s, another of the places he calls home, where he eats many of his meals, and often fills in as a cook, but I digress again.

This is a long book, full of digressions and love, and pain (that knee!), and fights, and loyalty, and inexplicable love. “Sully, Sully, Sully!” is a phrase often repeated with exasperation.

That darn Sully was a football champ as a youngster, and Coach Peoples loved him. His own son, Clive Jr, was not sporty – not much of anything really – so junior was always spitefully jealous of Sully.

“Sully, even as a sophomore, was everything Clive Jr., an eighth-grader, aspired to be—reckless, imaginative, contemptuous of authority and, above all, indifferent to pain. Sully, it seemed, scarcely got interested in the contest until someone on the other team landed a good shot or offered an insult, after which something changed in Sully’s eyes. If Sully couldn’t win the game, he’d start a fight and win that. If he couldn’t win the fight he’d started, he’d continue to hurl himself at whatever he couldn’t beat with increased fury, as if the knowledge that the battle was unwinnable heightened its importance. What Sully did better than anybody else was pick himself up off the ground, and when he returned to the huddle, bruised, nose-bloodied, limping, he’d still be hurling insults over his shoulder at whoever had put him on the ground. Seeing this, Clive Jr. had filled with terrible admiration and longing.”

But Sully is an ungovernable force on the field, not a team player, just an awfully successful one, so Coach Peoples hopes to impress upon him how football can be a metaphor for Life. He wants him to understand the basic principles, so he invites him to dinner once - but it goes on night after night.

“What he had not anticipated was that every night Sully would become involved in conversations not with himself, but rather with Miss Beryl, conversations about books and politics and the war America wasn’t going to be able to stay out of much longer, subjects that somehow diminished football and therefore its lessons about The Larger Context of Life.

. . . Miss Beryl, with Clive Sr.’s star athlete for an audience, seemed actually to be arguing that government, law, even God’s own church were not always worthy of respect. In Clive Sr.’s view, if these were seriously questioned, how long would it be before football coaches came under attack as well?”

Perish the thought!

Clive Jr’s problem is exacerbated now in their older years when Sully is living in Clive's mother’s house, so he still can’t avoid him. Clive Jr, or The Bank, as Sully calls him, is outwardly successful as the bank’s manager.

Also outwardly successful is Carl Roebuck, a property developer for whom Sully works on and off as a building labourer. Why he and Sully maintain such a fractured friendship is anyone’s guess, but they do. Sully quietly adores Carl’s gorgeous wife (who is happy for the older man to flirt with her), but meanwhile he has been having a widely-known 20-year relationship with someone else’s wife. But that’s getting a little old.

“Adultery, like full-court basketball, was a younger man’s sport, and engaging in it these last few years had made Sully feel a little foolish and undignified.”

Then there’s Rub, Sully’s slow-witted, smelly, doglike-loyal sidekick who calls Sully his best friend and cannot bear sharing him with anyone else. He is nearly beside himself with anguish when Sully’s son Peter and grandson Will return to Bath to visit. Sully’s ex-wife and husband Ralph raised Peter, a college professor, and Sully barely knows him.

Sully still barrels through life pretty much the way he did on the football field. His father, Big Jim, was a brute whose beatings he survived, but whose genes he fears get the better of him sometimes when he punches someone first and thinks about it later. He doesn’t really plan ahead. He needs money, so needs to work, doesn’t worry too much about being caught working instead of studying and affecting his disability claim, so starts hauling rocks in the snow with Rub.

“But six months always seemed a long way off to Sully, who was by and large an optimist and who always concluded that in six months he’d be better off than he was now for the simple reason that he couldn’t be any worse off. He was almost always wrong, of course, in both the result and the reasoning.”

He kept betting at the OTB (Off-Track Betting), although, as he tells someone:

“‘There are no smart people within a block of here,’ Sully told him. ‘The OTB is a tax on stupidity.’”

He is kind, generous, quick to help when he can but forgetful to such an extent that he can leave a dog tied up and forget to feed it if someone doesn’t remind him. Miss Beryl knows to leave the snow shovel propped up by the door where he’ll see it if he’s supposed to shovel the snow.

But he is the one who checks in with Miss Beryl every morning on his way out to see if the old girl is still alive (as he says), and he’s the one who lets Old Hattie out of her locked bedroom every morning and leads her safely down the step to her booth where she says every day:
“‘Who is it?’ The old woman grinned maniacally. ‘It sounds like that darn Sully.’”

All of the characters are memorable, and it was a delight to watch Sully begin to understand his family and friends a little. He realises he doesn’t see things the way everyone else does.

“In Sully’s life the years (never mind days) elided gracefully without dividers, and he was always surprised by the endings and new beginnings other people saw, or thought they saw, in their existences.
. . .
The graceful merging of his days was either depressing or reassuring, depending upon his mood.”

The knee continues to thrum and pain, his lawyer, Wirf, continues to warn him off working, (“‘You’re my pro bonehead work. You I do strictly for laughs’”)he spends his time and money at The Horse (bar), Hattie’s, the OTB, and at one point, jail. This is the kind of small town Bath is. The police and others play cards with him while he’s in jail.

“When the game grew too large for his cell, they’d had to move it down to the conference room next door to Booking. Sully had won all night long, with the result that he now had enough change in his pocket to set off a metal detector.”

He knows the odds in life are stacked against him, and whenever something does break his way, he manages to deflect it to someone else so that they are better off. We know he’s too good a man to be doing the stupid things he does, but he seems to have carved himself a Sully-sized space in life that only he can fill.

And fill it he does. Wonderful, wonderful, and there’s so much else, so many characters I’ve not even touched on. An absolute favourite!