Richard Russo, Nobody's Fool

Donald Sullivan—"Sully"—has rarely met a promising opportunity he didn't walk away from. Arguably the most stubbornly wrongheaded man in the economically depressed village of North Bath, New York, Sully scrapes a living as a jack of all trades, often fed construction work by the town's most fortunate scion, Carl Roebuck. Roebuck, a man with the sexual appetite of a satyr, enjoys an amusing love-hate relationship with Sully, the product of a lifetime of acquaintance in a small town. Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool abounds in these rich relationships, fully-formed characters sharing complex, realistic histories with one another. Chief among those characters is Sully's landlady and one-time 8th-grade teacher, 80-year-old Beryl Peoples, who has been Sully's staunch ally for more than forty years.

Nobody's Fool is a chronicle of one particularly trying period in Sully's life, during which he is plagued by a grotesquely swollen knee and by unusually vivid reminiscences of his abusive father, now dead.

"Sully hated to think of his father at rest, and had there been a way, and if Sully'd had the money, he'd have left instructions to have Big Jim dug up every decade or so, just to make sure he didn't get comfortable."

The book is beautifully written, and Russo's evocation of North Bath is so successful that the town and its strange-looking denizens will come to reside in your imagination. A good, long, slow read you'll be sorry to part with.

(Russo's novel was, I have discovered, made into a movie starring Paul Newman in 1994. Casting it in my head prior to learning this, I had settled on Robert Duvall, with Ethan Embry as Rub Squeers.)