Brian's Reviews > Nobody's Fool

“Love is a stupid thing.”

NOBODY’S FOOL was my first experience with Richard Russo. It was an interesting experience. There will be others. The book starts on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and 307 pages later we are closing out the Friday after Thanksgiving, and the novel still has over 200 pages to go. It’s a detailed and slow paced, yet engaging, read.
Mr. Russo has created an eclectic ensemble, inhabitants of a small upstate New York town called North Bath, whose lives intersect and rotate around the novel’s protagonist, Don “Sully” Sullivan, a 60 year old who has made some bad life choices. Some characters that I really enjoyed getting to know (among many) are Rub, simple minded but decent, and Mrs. Peoples, old, smart, and very observant of human nature. They are vibrant in their humanity. Also worth noting, the dialogue in this book crackles. There is humor on every page. Sully’s wry voice is especially fun when he banters with his sometime boss and frenemy, Carl Roebuck.

More than a few times, ideas about the human heart are considered in this text. Consider this thought, “An imperfect human heart, perfectly shattered…a condition so common as to be virtually universal, rendering issues of right or wrong almost incidental.” That line captures that thing where we recognize someone’s humanity through their ugliness. Other observations about our hearts that stuck with me: “The human heart, where compromise could not be struck, not ever” and this nugget, “…if indeed any human can be said to own his heart.” These are ideas of great depth, and worthy of contemplation.

Another interesting aspect of the text is Sully’s father (Big Jim) who is long dead before the book begins. He hovers over the book, and over Sully’s life. Mr. Russo does an excellent job of recreating the influence a bad parent can exert over a life.

Quotes:
• “Where was the middle ground between a sense of adventure and just plain sense?”
• “Part of getting old, she knew, was becoming unsure.”
• “Whenever he was on a stupid streak he was conscious of the faraway sound of his father’s laughter.”
• “You remain the uncontested master of the futile gesture.”
• “You could feel good in pain, and that was something not everybody knew.”
• “…and allowing herself to become intoxicated by the smells and sounds of food and family and terrible, terrible love and longing.”
• “Some phrases were truly magical in their ability to dredge up the past from the bottom of life’s lake.”
• “It didn’t pay to second guess every one of life’s decisions, to pretend to wisdom about the past from the safety of the present, the way so many people did when they got older.”
• “Don’t get stuck. Words to live by.”
• “I believed in intelligence and hard work until I met you. Only luck explains you.”
• “How come you never see anything headed your way until it runs over you?”

Mr. Russo has a nice ability to articulate some of the thoughts and observations that most of us make / have about the things around us in an insightful and clarifying manner. He uses a lot of words to do it, but the results in NOBODY’S FOOL are quite satisfying.