[In the following review, Mosher praises Russo's deft portrayal of small-town American life in Nobody's Fool, arguing that the novel contains “some of the most darkly yet genuinely funny scenes I've encountered in any recent fiction.”]

“This town will never change,” the proprietor of Hattie's Diner bleakly observes of the decayed old Adirondack resort village of Bath, toward the end of Richard Russo's superb new novel [Nobody's Fool]. On the surface, at least, this assessment seems irrefutable. After all, the mineral springs from which Bath originally took its name ran dry back in 1818; and the village has been tending toward obscurity ever since. Even the lovely old wineglass elms along Upper Main Street in front of Mrs. Beryl People's house are slowly dying, their blackening limbs a menace to the homes they once shaded.

Still, as Beryl's upstairs tenant, the aging jack-of-all-trades Donald “Sully” Sullivan, discovers, everything in the realm of human affairs even in Bath—is mutable. For starters, the town itself seems about to undergo a miraculous economic renaissance. The dilapidated resort hotel, the Sans Souci, is scheduled to reopen soon. Beryl People's banker son Clive (“The Bank,” as Sully facetiously calls him) is scheming night and day to attract out-of-state backing for a huge theme park, “The Ultimate Escape.” And Sully's own comfortable, longtime living arrangements above Mrs. Peoples are being threatened by the interfering Clive, who's afraid that Sully will burn down Beryl's home with a carelessly unextinguished cigarette—as, indeed, he did his previous landlord's place.

First, though, who exactly is Donald Sullivan? To his 80-year-old landlady (and ex-teacher), he's both a great favorite and a perennial disappointment. “Throughout his life a case study underachiever, Sully … was nobody's fool, a phrase that Sully no doubt appreciated without ever sensing its literal application—that at sixty, he was divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge, badly crippled and virtually unemployable—all of which he stubbornly confused with independence.”

Then, out of the blue, Sully's aloof grown son Peter, a college professor, shows up with his own son, Will, a shy, nervous boy whom Sully takes under his wing and nurtures, as he never did Peter. At the same time, Sully's off-again, on-again love affair with his long-time girlfriend, Ruth, seems to be lurching toward an unhappy conclusion. And he drops out of the local community college he's been attending to go back to construction work, despite a badly injured knee that has become “a symphony of pain.”

Worst of all, the forbidding memory of Sully's abusive father, the savage barroom brawler Big Jim Sullivan (who most prided himself that “he's lived a man's life and made a man's mistakes”), has been haunting Sully more and more frequently.

“Sully, Sully, Sully,” his friends say regularly throughout this character-driven novel, in affectionate exasperation with Russo's heedless, chronically forgetful, spontaneously generous and entirely believable hero, for whom “the deepest of life's mysteries [are] the mysteries of his own behavior.”

Nobody's Fool also presents us with a brilliant ensemble of other townspeople, from the sharp-tongued, good-hearted Beryl Peoples to Sully's hilariously ingenuous helper, Rub Squeers. Along the way, Russo tells us everything we're dying to learn about this off-the-beaten-track village, from its obsessive annual preparation for the big basketball game with its cross-county rival, Schuyler Springs, to the ludicrously virulent columns of the local weekly paper, with its “often inebriated, always scooped editor.”

As a bonus, the novel contains some of the most darkly yet genuinely funny scenes I've encountered in any recent fiction. Among my favorites are the untoward death, in the line of duty, of Mrs. People's driver's-ed-teacher husband, Clive Sr.; a neighborhood rampage, conducted by Sully's ex-wife, to extirpate Playboy magazine from the old home of her revered schoolteacher-father; an all-afternoon poker game in which Bath's chief of police loses his revolver and a nubile newcomer to town literally loses her shirt; and Sully's own sojourn in jail, over the Christmas holidays, for driving his truck down the sidewalk of Upper Main and punching the obnoxious local cop who stops him at gunpoint.

Is Donald Sullivan, for all his intelligence, capable of change? Without giving away the wonderful surprises at the end of the novel, I'll answer that question, which is central to the moral core of the story. Yes, he is—but only after coming to terms not just with his son and friends but, in a truly terrifying scene in an abandoned house long after midnight, with the belligerent specter of Big Jim Sullivan himself.

Self-knowledge, along with love in all its forms, from lifelong friendships to consuming sexual passions, is what this remarkably likable, beautifully written novel is all about. Like all the best fiction, it is ultimately a revelation of the human heart—which is, after all, the same in small towns and vast cities the world over.