Somebody's Fool

May 1, 2023

Recalling characters from Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool, this latest from Pulitzer Prize winner Russo focuses on the residents of North Bath, newly incorporated into neighboring Schuyler Springs, as they struggle to recover from the death of Donald "Sully" Sullivan. Sully's son Peter finds himself being asked to fill his father's role in the community while reflecting on his relationships with his own sons, Thomas and Will. After Douglas Raymer's resignation, Charice Bond hits the ground running in her new position as the chief of police when a dead body is found in a local abandoned hotel. Meanwhile, Ruth and her daughter Janey work to repair their strained relationships with each other and with Janey's daughter Tina. Russo's latest book has an engaging plot that sensitively and insightfully explores themes of grief and reconciliation. The storytelling style occasionally gets weighed down with exposition, and the physical environment of the novel seems to fade from view as the narrator explores the internal lives of a large cast of characters. However, the relationships between the characters give this story an emotional depth that has an undeniable appeal for readers of general fiction. VERDICT Russo's insightful exploration of grief and reconciliation will appeal to a wide audience, but readers may find it challenging to get through some of its exposition-heavy sections.--Conner Williams

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May 8, 2023
Russo (Nobody’s Fool) concludes his North Bath trilogy with a wise and witty drama of small-town life. Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the hero of the first two books, has been dead for 10 years, a loss that many of the characters in this volume continue to grapple with. Sully’s son, Peter, who always assumed he was destined for bigger and better things than small-town North Bath, N.Y., sticks around to renovate his father’s Victorian house. Meanwhile, former police chief Douglas Raymer contemplates the loss of his job after the town was annexed by its richer neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Adding to the complications for Raymer, his longtime girlfriend is made the new Schuyler Springs police chief. But it’s Peter’s estranged son, Thomas, who sets the plot in motion when he shows up in North Bath unannounced. Thomas claims he’s just passing through on his way to Montreal, but Peter believes otherwise, and circumstances soon suggest more sinister motivations involving revenge for Peter’s abandonment of Thomas as a child. Russo gets a slow start, laying on a bit too much backstory at the outset, but the novel soon picks up speed, delivering the generous humor, keen ear for dialogue, and deep appreciation for humanity’s foibles that have endeared the author to his readers for decades. Though Sully is gone, his world is alive and well.

Starred review from May 1, 2023
Russo rounds out his North Bath trilogy, following Nobody's Fool (1993) and Everybody's Fool (2016), with one last wellness check on a cast of familiar characters who remain as frisky as a litter of puppies and often as cantankerous as a pack of wolves. Russo's beloved Sully has died, having just rekindled a relationship with his estranged son, Peter. Now Peter has inherited Sully's Victorian fixer-upper along with an ever-growing list of friends, lovers, and even enemies he's obliged to care for. North Bath being North Bath, this motley crew has its own twisted history of messy relationships that pull a reluctant Peter further into a life in his father's shadow. It doesn't take much to rattle such a tight-knit little world, and this upstate New York town's tectonic plates shift with the arrival of Thomas, Peter's own estranged son, who comes armed with a litany of lies, a sizable chip on his shoulder, and a secret scheme for arson. Russo's beguiling art is the mastery of cloaking complex human emotions and conflicts in surprisingly simple guises, and he brings depths of pathos and wisdom to this Everyman microcosm by challenging its citizens in unlikely ways, only to have them emerge whole and even heroic. There have never been fools in Russo's world, just lovely, relatable people navigating foolish situations.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Russo's fans are waiting for the last Fool novel, a buzzed-about release backed by a new AMC series, Lucky Hank, based on Russo's novel, Straight Man (1997), and starring Bob Odenkirk

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
Back to North Bath, New York, for a third round of misadventures, tomfoolery, and personal growth. The demise of Donald "Sully" Sullivan, Russo's beloved main character, in Everybody's Fool (2016), is no obstacle to the success of the author's return visit to the benighted North Bath, though at its opening the town is put out of its misery by being officially dissolved, its environs annexed to its bright and shiny neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Despite his death, Sully casts a long shadow over the doings of the remaining population: Peter, his college professor son; Rub, his old sidekick; Chief of Police Douglas Raymer, his erstwhile nemesis; Ruth, his longtime paramour--all constantly find themselves recalling his instructions and example. Though the closing of the North Bath police department puts Raymer out of a job, when a body is found at the long-shuttered Sans Souci hotel, he is sent to investigate by his former employee and on-again, off-again girlfriend: the new chief of police of Schuyler Springs, Charice Bond. Charice is attractive and Black, while middle-aged Raymer looks like "he and the Pillsbury Doughboy might have a common ancestor," but Charice's twin brother, Jerome, is on hand to teach Raymer a few things he needs to know about the Black experience. In other news, a third generation of Sullivan shows up in town--Peter's son Thomas, from whom he has been long estranged. Thomas looks a lot like his brother Will, the only one of the boys Peter raised, now abroad on a Fulbright scholarship as a result of advantages that Thomas and his younger brother lacked and about which they are bitterly resentful. Another three-generation plotline involves the thorny relationships among Ruth, her daughter, Janey, and her granddaughter, Tina. Bad cops, bigotry, partner violence, nefarious schemes, and confusing therapy sessions aside, almost all of the characters experience significant improvements in their self-concepts, relationships, and circumstances. The king is dead, long live the king! Russo's version of the good old-fashioned comic novel is the gold standard, full of heart and dexterous storytelling.

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