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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
May 2016, 496 pages
Paperback:
Jan 2017, 528 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Sarah Tomp
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Richard Russo, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody's Fool (1993) a "confident, assured novel [that] sweeps the reader up," according to the San Francisco Chronicle back then. "Simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated." Or, as The Boston Globe put it, "a big, rambunctious novel with endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness."
The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it's hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years ... the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends ... Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who's obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might've been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident ... Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing ... and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there's Charice Bond - a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer's office - as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.
Everybody's Fool is filled with humor, heart, hard times and people you can't help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so stridently human. This is classic Russo - and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
Triangle
Hilldale cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path. Death was not a thing unknown to the town's first hearty residents, but they seemed to have badly misjudged how much of it there'd be, how much ground would be needed to accommodate those lost to harsh winters, violent encounters with savages and all manner of illness. Or was it life, their own fecundity, they'd miscalculated? Ironically, it amounted to the same thing. The plot of land set aside on the outskirts of town became crowded, then overcrowded, then chock-full, until finally the dead broke containment, spilling across the now-paved road onto the barren flats and reaching as far as the new highway spur that led to the interstate. Where they'd head next was anybody's guess.
Though blighted by Dutch elm disease in the '70s and more recently by a mold that attacked...
Despite the heavy focus on characters, the plot is rich and varied, with plenty of action, suspense and surprise twists. A mixture of manic action and introspective reflection, with a hint of a love story, Everybody's Fool has something for everybody...continued
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(Reviewed by Sarah Tomp).
One of the side plots of Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo involves a town outsider illegally dealing in dangerous exotic reptiles. He rents an inexpensive apartment and hires one of the local residents to stay there during the day in order to receive packages, often marked as "perishable." The boxes are stored either in a highly air-conditioned bedroom or the refrigerator. The cool conditions keep the reptiles in a dormant hibernating state until they can be handled. Due to a culmination of events spurred by a massive heat wave, a venomous cobra escapes and requires the apartment complex to be evacuated.
The exotic animal trade — peddles large cats, primates, birds, and even bears, in addition to reptiles — is a ...
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