Contemporary Literary Criticism | Russo, Richard - Steve Brzezinski (review date winter 1994)

Steve Brzezinski (review date winter 1994)

SOURCE: Brzezinski, Steve. Review of Nobody's Fool, by Richard Russo. Antioch Review 52, no. 1 (winter 1994): 173-74.

[In the following review, Brzezinski commends the ambitious scope of the narrative in Nobody's Fool.]

Russo's third novel [Nobody's Fool] is an ambitious look at two topics currently out of favor in American literature: class and small-town America. Though the book is too long by at least 200 pages, it is peopled with extraordinarily well-drawn characters, most of them either poor and struggling or rich and bumbling, whose inevitable mistakes and missteps are chronicled in an excruciatingly comic yet deeply compassionate narrative. Russo's fictional setting of Bath, New York, is a town down on its luck, in slow decline since the interstate highway was built, too far from Albany to experience the economic windfall of suburban gentrification. Much of the plot surrounds...

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