[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 for his characters dominates his every page. By the time his narrative escapades are over, half the cast seems as familiar as the neighborhood bowling alley.

The subject of class is one of the great unmined territories of contemporary fiction; with the exception of Russell Banks (and with the death of Raymond Carver), few nonminority American writers tend to look much further than the outer limit on their VISA cards. In his earlier novels, Mohawk and The Risk Pool, as well as the garrulous Nobody's Fool, Russo is entrenched in the workaday reality of a struggling rural population, from their flickering dreams to the way they put their boots on in the morning. His characters are often as outlandish as they are poignant, and that dexterity of texture is what makes for such a fully realized fictional world.

But regardless of his comic reach, there are always ghosts on the loose in Russo's lonely towns—traces of memory or regret, of a child's sorrow or a father's rage. These misty presences roam the pool halls and betting parlors where men go to get warm, and they provide the central tension of what otherwise might be merely picaresque. In Nobody's Fool, the dominant game of shadow-boxing is between 60-year-old Donald Sullivan, “Sully” to everyone who knows him, and his father, Big Jim, who's been dead for five years. Between the son's wiseacre foibles and the father's violence lie half the secrets of Bath, N.Y.

A hand-to-mouth construction worker with a mangled knee, Sully is the town's endearing rogue and the star player of Nobody's Fool—a man who seems responsible for much of the trouble in Bath along with most of its goodness. It's now 1984, but luck left the place more than a century ago, when the town's mineral waters ran dry and wealthy tourists took their money down the road to Schuyler Springs. Folks are still waiting for the winds of change. They gather in Hattie's Cafe or the White Horse Tavern, ragging each other and carrying on affairs and promising themselves a better day. Their ungrateful kids and thankless jobs greet them every morning, along with the black-branched elm trees on Main Street that droop more ominously each year.

Bath and its inhabitants, in other words, seem governed by “some cruel law of subtraction”—as though the very life force that binds them together is leaking away. With his prideful lack of emotional attachments and material possessions, Sully is the personification of this gradual loss; in keeping with the title of the novel, he's beholden to the idea that no one needs him and thus no one can hurt him. In this regard, Nobody's Fool puts a realist's spin on It's a Wonderful Life: What happens if you think your life doesn't matter to other people, but you stick around to make sure?

Sully can thank his bullying father for such fierce autonomy, and he inflicts it on everyone who cares for him, from his snooty, academic son, Peter (who didn't get tenure), to his slow-as-molasses sidekick, Rub (who bears every insult Sully delivers). The action of Nobody's Fool takes place over several weeks around Christmas, and this microcosmic span allows the development of an extraordinary panoply of characters. Most formidable is Sully's tiny landlady, Miss Beryl Peoples, who taught eighth-grade English for four decades, thereby terrifying half the town of Bath (she still does). Widowed for years, Miss Beryl talks each day to a photograph of her husband, Clive Sr.—and then weighs his advice against the counsel of Ed, an African mask who hangs in the living room and tells her whatever she wants to hear.

Along with her rich inner life, Miss Beryl has a smarmy entrepreneurial son—“a study in self-importance”—who's raising money for a local theme park called the Ultimate Escape. (As president of the town's savings and loan, Clive Jr. is to Bath what Cliff Barnes was to “Dallas.”) But we wear the chains we forge in life, as Miss Beryl would say, and the weak links are all over Bath: Sully's ex-wife, Vera, who's about 2 inches shy of a total breakdown; his shady pharmacist, Jocko, who slips him pain-pill samples; his inebriated lawyer, Wirf, whose idea of legal counsel is writing ominous messages on damp cocktail napkins. Sully has the nefarious Carl Roebuck to provide him with under-the-table jobs and Ruth, his married girlfriend, to keep him honest; together, the entire ragged cast sustains itself with what is probably the crux of the novel—what Russo calls “the mystery of affection.”

As with his previous work, Nobody's Fool is a sad novel camouflaged in comedy; many of its characters, particularly Sully, are generously wrought. And Russo's eye for detail is splendid, from Miss Beryl's trivial revenge on her son's fiance to the quiet agony of a holiday dinner. But the same indulgence that allows Sully to get away with murder is what gets his creator into trouble. Nobody's Fool has a few slipshod or badly realized characters; two women seem especially ill-conceived, and a little girl's misery is never explained. And the novel is too long-winded: Russo's tendency toward repetitive vignette—Wirf at the bar, Rub on the job, Sully mouthing off—has the problematic effect of diluting what is best about the book. It's like staying too long at a family reunion. You were thrilled to see your uncle when you got there, but by twilight, the jokes are starting to wear thin.

This is unfortunate, because Russo is a born storyteller. Some of the weaknesses and irritations of Nobody's Fool might have been avoided with distance; surely Russo knows that not every death in a novel can be turned into comic error, and that the resolutions at the close of his story were easily predictable 100 pages back. If he'd spent more time on Sully's inner life (doesn't he have one, really?) and less on his ironic repartee, Nobody's Fool wouldn't have risked sounding like a player piano by its end.

But I appreciate Richard Russo's spirit: It is not a popular thing these days to write a big, rambunctious novel that has as its central motif an entire town. With its endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness, Nobody's Fool delivers a sepia-toned portrait—of a place in America most people didn't even know was there.