Richard Russo - Nobodys Fool

The fun of this novel is in hearing these guys (and women) talk theyre funny, quick and inventive. The novels tone has the same intelligence as its characters.

The New York Times Book Review

Reading this large, comfortable, good-natured novel feels great. [It] teems with local characters richly conceived and drawn so lovingly that you cant help but like them.

Philadelphia Inquirer

[Sully is] reminiscent, in a way, of Bellows old men. One never tires of watching him, because he has the capacity to make everyone around him feel better, including the reader.

The New Yorker

Few novelists plow this soil with more even-handed ease and naturalness than Russo. He demonstrates a rare ability to find affection for even his most empty [characters] while questioning the choices of those he most values. His success in keeping us involved is especially impressive.

Chicago Sun-Times

Nobodys Fool is a giant hard-edged comedy, a Flannery OConnor story taken north and gone ballistic. Russos smart prose gives Sullys, and everyone elses, dim propsects a witty, allegorical weight.

Mirabella

Richard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small town America. He is compulsively readable. Alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos, he captures with perfection the pulse of small-town life and the rhythm of dramatically changing seasons. His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they also are human.

Houston Chronicle

An intelligently drawn portrait What has made Russos work so consistently compelling is the depth of character, the richness of life.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

The Risk Pool
Mohawk
Straight Man
Empire Falls
The Whores Child and Other Stories

Richard Russo
NOBODYS FOOL

Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobodys Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, and a collection of stories, The Whores Child.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1994

Copyright1993 by Richard Russo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russo, Richard, 1949
Nobodys fool / Richard Russo. 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed.
p. cm.
Reprint. Previously published: New York: Random House, 1993.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80992-6
1. City and town lifeNew York (State)Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3568.U812N6 1994]
813 .54dc20 93-42193

Author photograph Jere DeWaters

v3.1

FOR JEAN LEVARN FINDLAY

The author gratefully acknowledges generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Thanks also to Linda Stuart and Alan Rancourt for advice on technical matters. Gratitude as well for coffee and understanding to the staffs of Cristaudos and Dennys in Carbondale and The Open Hearth in Waterville. And, for priceless faith and encouragement, my dearest thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Craig Holden, David Rosenthal and, always, my wife, Barbara.

U pper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the towns two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to italthough Main, from its lower end by the IGA and Tastee Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter milewere mostly dinosaurs, big, aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats. The most impressive feature of Upper Main was not its houses, however, but the regiment of ancient elms, whose upper limbs arched over the steeply pitched roofs of these elderly houses, as well as the street below, to green cathedral effect, bathing the street in breeze-blown shadows that masked the peeling paint and rendered the sloping porches and crooked eaves of the houses quaint in their decay. City people on their way north, getting off the interstate in search of food and fuel, often slowed as they drove through the village and peered nostalgically out their windows at the old houses, wondering idly what they cost and what they must be like inside and what it would be like to live in them and walk to the village in the shade. Surely this would be a better life. On their way back to the city after the long weekend, some of the most powerfully affected briefly considered getting off the interstate again to repeat the experience, perhaps even look into the real estate market. But then they remembered how the exit had been tricky, how North Bath hadnt been all that close to the highway, how they were getting back to the city later than they planned as it was, and how difficult it would be to articulate to the kids in the backseat why they would even want to make such a detour for the privilege of driving up a tree-lined street for all of three blocks, before turning around and heading back to the interstate. Such towns were pretty, green graves, they knew, and so the impulse to take a second look died unarticulated and the cars flew by the North Bath exit without slowing down.

Perhaps they were wise, for what attracted them most about the three-block stretch of Upper Main, the long arch of giant elms, was largely a deceit, as those who lived beneath them could testify. For a long time the trees had been the pride of the neighborhood, having miraculously escaped the blight of Dutch elm disease. Only recently, without warning, the elms had turned sinister. The winter of 1979 brought a terrible ice storm, and the following summer the leaves on almost half of the elms strangled on their branches, turning sickly yellow and falling during the dog days of August instead of mid-October. Experts were summoned, and they arrived in three separate vans, each of which sported a happy tree logo, and the young men who climbed out of these vans wore white coats, as if they imagined themselves doctors. They sauntered in circles around each tree, picked at its bark, tapped its trunk with hammers as if the trees were suspected of harboring secret chambers, picked up swatches of decomposing leaves from the gutters and held them up to the fading afternoon light.