[In the following review, Proulx lauds Russo's comedic prose in Nobody's Fool, noting Russo's recurring examination of child-parent relationships.]

If ever time travel is invented, let Richard Russo be first through the machine to bring back a true account. No one writing today catches the detail of life with such stunning accuracy.

Russo's third novel, Nobody's Fool, is a rude, comic, harsh, galloping story of four generations of small-town losers, the best literary portrait of the backwater burg since “Main Street.” Here is a masterly use of the wisecrack, the minor inflection, the between-the-lines meaning. Heavy messages hang under small-talk like keels under boats. Russo's pointillist technique makes his characters astonishingly real, and gradually the tiny events and details coalesce, build up in meaning and awaken in the reader a desire to climb into the page and ask for a beer.

The setting for Nobody's Fool, as for Russo's two critically acclaimed earlier novels, Mohawk (1986), and The Risk Pool (1988), is upstate New York. The depressed town of Bath is any of a thousand other towns past their best days; a sag in the landscape with high unemployment, a greasy spoon, a few bars, a bank, an auto-parts-and-used-car lot. To Clive Peoples Sr., the long-dead coach and driver-ed instructor who lurches through the story like Quasimodo in a letter sweater “… everything in the world was represented, somehow, right where they lived,” and this is how Russo plays the card.

Small towns disgorge the talented and able. Russo writes of the ones who stay behind, caught in invisible economic nets like gasping fish, parceling out the few jobs and mates among each other and trading both around from time to time. No one has any money, and if some windfall drops from the lottery, poker or horse tree, it is just luck, and the money, like the luck, is evanescent.

The story revolves around Sully, regarded by most Bath residents as nobody's fool. The 60-year-old son of Big Jim, a long-dead brutal drunkard, Sully cannot get over being his father's son. Every time he passes the cemetery he throws his father the finger, lets the house he has inherited from him fall into ruin as a fine filial insult. Big Jim's most sickening deed—which keeps bobbing up in the story like a corpse in a river—was to cause a young boy's impalement on a fence, then, through con-artist blather, persuade the horrified townspeople that he was the victim, in danger of losing his employment for just doing his job.

Sully has a hugely swollen injured knee but takes pleasure in defying pain. We start to know him when single-handedly, without the aid of his dim-witted, reeking friend Rub Squeers, he loads concrete blocks onto his beat-up truck. Withstanding affliction—even seeking it out—counts for much with Sully. The overloaded truck sinks into the mud and Sully has to hitchhike home as housewives driving grocery-laden station wagons pass him by:

These housewives … concluded, despite the fact that there was no prison within a hundred-mile radius, that the man must be an escaped convict, a murderer surely, who had spent the night in the marsh to escape the dogs. Either that or he was a premature burial from the nearby cemetery who had clawed his way out of his casket and up through the black earth and into the air. Where most hitchhikers at least attempted to look friendly, or failing that, pitiful, this one looked just plain dangerous. Something about the way he held out his thumb suggested that the fist attached to it might contain a live grenade.

Although Sully, “… a lonely, stubborn, unlucky man,” seems always “… looking for a car to hit head on,” he is also irreverent, tough, companionably close to his bad luck and—the other side of the gambling coin—often fired with unwarranted optimism; he has grit and awesome stamina, a sense of humour, a sense of self. His main virtue is his ability to endure, to ride through disaster on wry wit. If, by some peculiar shake of Fate's dice, there is no helping of broken glass on his plate, he is not beyond smashing some up.

The story is peopled with a sideshow of memorable characters: the druggist who dispenses experimental painkillers from his glove compartment; the father-in-law with the breathing problem, something of a fixture in Russoland; lucky Carl Roebuck who doesn't see that his money, beautiful wife and golden touch is nothing but a prolonged roll of the cosmic dice; a hot and cold priest duo; a punch-up tyke; Sully's occasional lover, the long-suffering Ruth, whose timing is always off; the abrasive and abusive Janey (Ruth says she's Sully's daughter) and her idiot-savant kid; and the alternating Greek choruses of all-night poker players, bartenders and short-order cooks. Smart old Beryl Peoples, for 40 years a teacher, is the cement of the story. At 80 she is an authority on human nature, the voice of reason in this tilted pinball game view of life.

In all of Russo's novels his creative territory is staked out around the primary human relationship—child and parent. In Nobody's Fool these complex and painful connections never mature and never end, not with age, not even with death; and he shows us again and again that the seed of the adult is in the child. Most of the children are in their 60s with children and grandchildren of their own, and their parents are in their 80s and 90s or dead. The grating antipathies are never resolved.

We shift back and forth from Sully and his dead father to Sully's own unloved son Peter, a failed university teacher who doesn't understand the nature of luck, and Peter's sons, timorous Will and the little bully, Wacker. Cass of Hattie's Lunch, hates and wishes her mother would die so she can move out west and start being happy. But when the old woman is killed by the cash register she loves, Cass staggers with displacement. Beryl Peoples has always liked Sully more than her own resentful and hungering son Clive Jr., who is almost 60 before he gets a taste of the wild honey, and then only by absconding with bank funds, driving a Lincoln with a broken axle, taunting a cop and thinking, as he veers loosely over high-speed roads, “… that he was neither in nor out of control” and reflecting that at last this “… was what it felt like to be Sully.”

The relationships between men and women in Nobody's Fool are as flawed as those between children and parents. It is not only the absence of love (never there, burned out or distorted) that tortures but also the burden of too much love: Sully's ex-wife, who sobs in his arms that she hates him, pesters and whips her father and her son with her fretful affection. Only with the fourth generation, Sully's timid and frail grandson, Will, does there seem a chance that 60 years of neglect-fired hate may shift into a different gear.

Russo's interest in affliction and suffering invites comparison of his work with that of Russell Banks and Andre Dubus, though Russo capers away, with self-biting humor, from resolutions of atonement, redemption or expiation. In Nobody's Fool the random hand of chance is everything, and the best that can be hoped for in the end is a shift in luck. It's all crazy, anyway. No one can tell which way the needle will jump. A brief exchange between Sully and his dying lawyer, Abraham Wirfly, gives us a glimpse of the direction.

“Now tell me. What'd Barton want with you this morning?”

Sully snorted. “He wanted to know about the day my old man spiked that kid on the fence.”

Wirf nodded thoughtfully. “… What'd you tell him?”

“Nothing,” Sully said. “That it was an accident.”

Wirf nodded.

“Which was a lie. He shook the fence until the kid lost his grip and fell.”

“You saw him?”

“My brother did,” Sully grinned. “All I saw was the kid hanging there by his jaw with the spike sticking out of his mouth.”

Wirf took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It's a wonder we aren't all insane.”

“We are,” Sully said, getting up from his stool. His conviction surprised him. “I believe that.”

After the last sentence is read and the book put away, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, getting into cars, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are.