Somebody's Fool Completes Russo's Trilogy

 

 

Somebody’s Fool  (2023)

By Richard Russo

Knopf, 464 pages

★★★★

 

 

 

Somebody’s Fool completes the North Bath, New York trilogy. Even if you’ve only seen the movie version of book one, Nobody’s Fool (2018), you know that author Richard Russo is a keen observer of blue-collar life. In book two, protagonist Donald Sullivan dies. Somebody’s Fool picks up the pieces through Sully’s son Peter, a divorced man frustrated in his academic career. He moves into the house “Sully” inherited with the idea of restoring it, does some part-time teaching, and takes a journalism gig. His plan is to flip the house and move back to New York. Un huh.

 

Somebody’s Fool is a ghost story without a specter. Even ten years after his death much of the town of North Bath operates according to a WWSD principle: What Would Sully Do? As as one character asks, “…what if dead wasn’t the same as gone?” Sully was certainly not a model citizen, but his stubbornness, his support for underdogs, and his crankiness made him magnetic in a rough town that had seen better days. It’s still a given that not just anyone can sit in Sully’s stool at Birdie’s. Now North Bath is slated to be absorbed by its more affluent neighbor, Schuyler Springs. That news is greeted with all the enthusiasm of being told that root canal surgery is needed. Who cares if North Bath is broke and decaying? It boils down to culture–blue collar versus the upwardly mobile. What will happen to blue-collar bars and diners?

 

As in the previous two books, Russo weaves parallel lives into his story. Police Chief Doug Raymer is about to lose his job, but try telling that to people in North Bath who call him when a man is found hanging at a closed resort. His on/off African American girlfriend Charice is the new chief in Schuyler Springs, but she has issues of her own, not the least of which are resistance to her authority, confusion over how she feels about Doug, and her OCD brother Jerome. He is highly educated, erudite, and is normally meticulously dressed, but he reappears as unkempt, disheveled, and tottering on the edge of being unhinged. Former deputy Del (Conrad Delgado) still sees Doug as chief, though he too is working across the river and is aware enough to know that he’s the butt of contempt from other officers; he’s just not savvy enough to do anything about it. He does, however, have a new girlfriend who is trying to free herself from her abusive husband. Even dim-witted Rub is back, and there are surprising revelations about him.  The same is true of Carl, Sully’s old boss, who has fallen from crooked grace.

 

Throughout, locals find themselves musing upon one of the late Sully’s pearls of wisdom: “Do some f***ing thing. If that doesn’t work, do something else.” Peter especially needs to heed that advice when the children his ex-wife refused to let him see come back into play. Peter is also forced to confront dilemmas I suspect many readers will recognize. How many of us tried very hard to be unlike our parents, only to fear that we are more like them than we thought? Who are the people who have their act together and who are those who only imagine they do? How do we adjust when we discover that what we think we wanted isn’t really what we wanted at all?

 

In other words, there’s quite a lot going on in Somebody’s Fool, including solving the mystery of the hanging victim. Even Russo’s title is not as simple as it sounds. Who’s the fool? The snap answer is that it’s Peter. Perhaps, but the more we read the more we come to suspect that everybody is somebody’s fool. If you take that path, then the novel’s purpose shifts to sorting good fools from the bad. 

 

As I have said in previous reviews of Russo books, he’s one of the few authors who never disappoints me. As always, Russo interjects enough humor to make certain we never grow overly serious or sad. My one small criticism of Somebody’s Fool is that it starts to tick au courant politically correct boxes as it nears its end. It’s not a matter of whether or not readers agree with such positions, but how they’d play in North Bath. Individuals change, but does a whole town?

 

Rob Weir