Review - Nobody's Fool

Visiting my local recycling centre I noticed, as I sat in my car in a line of cars full of wood, metal, grass cuttings and other off-cuts and leftovers of domestic life, a full set of golf clubs, still in their golf bag, leaning against one of the skips. Someone had obviously had enough and consigned the instruments of their torture to the tip, where they had been retrieved by an eagle eyed council worker, intent on bettering either his handicap or his eBay rating.

Sully, the hero of Richard Russo’s novel ‘Nobody’s fool’, would not have approved. He would not have approved of a man playing golf, would disapprove of his giving up golf even more and, most of all, would not have approved in a man depositing his clubs in a recycling centre rather than, say, taking an angle-grinder to them. Then, Sully would probably not approve of a recycling centre, preferring a dump or tip. Sully, though capable of contradiction, is not a hypocrite and would certainly believe that when you throw something away, you get rid of it for life. Or at least you try to.

Sully does well to hold on to the role of main character in a novel full of them. The common theme running through the characters is damage, visible or not. Sully himself has a mangled knee, his lawyer has an artificial leg. Other males show some outward sign of damage or defect and the entire population of the small town they inhabit is described by an outsider as ‘funny-looking’. The females are also damaged in their way, Sully’s landlady is abnormally short and suffers a stroke during the progress of the story, Sully’s ex-wife has a full-blown breakdown.

There’s certainly a lot going on in the small town of Bath between thanksgiving and New Year. The events prove to be what Sully’s life has been building towards. A man who has tried all of his life to avoid or simply ignore any obligation or responsibility finds past responsibilities coming back to haunt him in the form of his son and his grandson, who closely resembles his son at that age, an age when Sully had little contact with him. His landlady is fond of reminding Sully that ‘we wear the chains we forge in life’, apt at Christmas time and for a man being visited by the spirits of his past.

The small town of Bath is beautifully drawn here, reading ‘Nobody’s Fool’ allowed me to visit The Horse and made me crave a big ol’ cheeseburger and long necked beer to wash it down, or visit the diner for breakfast. Such places only exist in our memories, tinted by nostalgia, or in the pages of books now.

While the town and the people inhabiting it are warm, the winter is cold and that too is beautifully described, not as a winter wonderland (indeed Sully is praying for snow so that he can use the plough attachment for his truck and make some money) but in the hard unforgiving nature of true winter, that breaks the branches on the elms that line the street he lives on and causes his landlady so much concern, or hardens the ground so that Sully can’t do the hard graft that supports him.

One of the most attractive things about the story is that Sully is entirely uncompromising throughout. Acutely aware of his many failings – he knows for instance when he is on a ‘stupid streak’ – he persists with his actions which, though ill considered, are usually the right ones, even if they do include punching a policeman.

Small towns in novels have their share of eccentrics and Sully is not one of these, he’s not rich enough, so he’s merely a pain in the ass. It’s the normal folk in the novel that are shown as causing the real, long term pain to those around them. Sully, forgetful and irresponsible is, towards the revealing final act of the novel, the one who is responsible for the well-being of all those around him. This is a carefully handled transition and purposely not a redemption – Sully never needed to be redeemed in the first place.