Understanding Richard Russo

Chapter 4: Nobody’s Fool

chapter 4 Nobody’s Fool Richard Russo has often professed his deep admiration for the broad canvases and large casts of long nineteenth-century novels, “because of their ambition, their wanting to see more of the world, their desire not just to look at the interior workings of a single character and situation.”1 This narrative ambition clearly surfaces in his third novel, Nobody’s Fool, which employs a straight third-person omniscient narrator who closely follows the life of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, a sixty-year-old handyman with a badly injured knee, as he pinballs from job to poker game, courtroom to jail, diner to OTB and back again amid a sea of secondary characters almost too numerous to count. According to Russo, the actual writing of Nobody’s Fool was “excruciating ” because of his long struggle to identify the appropriate narrative approach. “I started it in Sully’s voice,” he explained in a 1993 interview, “and wrote hundreds of pages before I found that his point of view was too limiting. I wrote a second draft as a series of narrations through various characters’ eyes, then I had to throw that away when I realized this was an omniscient book; I needed to be outside all the characters with access to their thoughts.”2 In Nobody’s Fool, Russo leaves behind the fictional town of Mohawk, New York, for a new setting, ostensibly just up the road. North Bath bears a number of resemblances to Mohawk; both are out-of-the-way upstate New York towns with small populations and even smaller economic prospects. However, they have significantly different histories. Mohawk carries with it the burden of failed factories and tanneries; its manufacturing workforce remains in place but without a place to work. North Bath, however, was never a manufacturing town. Its history lay in tourism; the discovery of mineral springs in the area led to a population boom in the nineteenth century. As a NOBODY’S FOOL 45 result a huge resort hotel was built to host thousands of visitors, and a local service industry thrived. But when the springs dried up in 1868, the fortunes of the town dried up just as quickly. In contrast, a nearby town, Schulyer Springs, found its mineral springs to be perfectly stable, and so the economy there flourished. More than a century later, in the mid-1980s, the residents of North Bath still find themselves waiting for their luck to change and cursing the good fortune of their thriving neighbors. After many decades of stasis in North Bath, the town is in a moment of flux in Nobody’s Fool as its deeply felt isolation from the rest of the world appears to be about to end. Plans for a giant and controversial amusement park, “The Ultimate Escape,” are in the works, and although many residents look to this project as a remedy for the chronic unemployment that drives young people away, others fear the loss of their small-town peacefulness and the disruption of a cemetery near the building site. Yuppies from Albany have begun buying and renovating the once-beautiful, now-decrepit Victorian mansions on Upper Main Street, bringing a new source of revenue to the town but at the same time changing the tenor of the neighborhood. In many ways North Bath appears to be on the cusp of a significant transformation, and so too does Sully, who has spent the last several decades in a relatively steady state. The story of Nobody’s Fool takes place over the course of about two months, from the day before Thanksgiving in 1984 until about mid-January 1985. During these weeks the fate of the town and the fortunes of Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the main character, change considerably. Sully is a divorced handyman with a grown son he barely knows, an on-again, off-again relationship with a married waitress named Ruth, and a seething hatred for his late father, who was a drunk, abusive manipulator. Sully occupies an almostempty apartment above the home of Mrs. Beryl Peoples, an eighty-year-old retired English teacher, whose son, Clive Jr., is the president of the local bank and the person responsible for the development of “The Ultimate Escape.” Sully has been awarded partial disability support because of a serious knee injury, and as a condition of his payments the court has ordered him to take classes (in refrigeration and air-conditioning repair) at the local community college in order to...