Contemporary Literary Criticism | Russo, Richard - Gail Caldwell (review date 27 June 1993)

Gail Caldwell (review date 27 June 1993)

SOURCE: Caldwell, Gail. “The Last Resort.” Boston Globe (27 June 1993): 94, 96.

[In the following review of Nobody's Fool, Caldwell praises Russo's narrative skill and literary vision but finds the novel excessively lengthy and repetitious.]

With his infinite winters and unreflective townfolk, Richard Russo is a master craftsman at broken-pipe realism. He has an anachronistic fondness for sprawling, ordinary life, and his characters are etched large by this grainy intimacy—by the close-focus detail of work endured, love lost, another day gone the way of cruel oblivion. All three of his novels are set in half-defeated hamlets in upstate New York, where foreclosure signs on the main drag compete with old cafes and run-down Victorians. The blue-collar heartache at the center of Russo's fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving; this is a writer whose affection...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass