[In the following review, Kaveney commends Russo's “ear for social ritual and the comedy that goes with it” in Nobody's Fool but laments the novel's occasionally stereotypical characterizations.]

Early in this likeable, if blokeish, novel of American small-town life, [Nobody's Fool,] crippled reprobate Sully fails to recognise the source of the quotation (“We wear the chains we forge in life”) of which his former English teacher—Miss Beryl, now his landlady—is so fond. Since Russo makes a point of highlighting it at the beginning and end of the novel, we should pay attention. The alert reader may recognise it as coming from A Christmas Carol; since Russo's novel runs from Thanksgiving to New Year, we may take it that what is enacted here is as much a fairy-tale of redemption as dirty realism.

Russo is obsessed with macho middle-aged headbangers; Sully is nicer than Sam Hall, the father in The Risk Pool, more sensitive about other people's feelings and less compulsive about the more obvious forms of self-destruction. Like Sam, he has been estranged from his son; this novel, like its predecessor, is a myth of father-son reconciliation and its opposite. Sully's inability to forgive his father and brother, his shadow doubles, cripples him almost as much as his bad knee.

This is not just a book about men emoting at each other. Sully's relationship with Miss Beryl has elements of the sexual, but, like his mistress and the woman in whose diner he eats, she is fundamentally his surrogate mother. Crudely, it is when she abandons this role that she is nearly defrauded by her actual son, a crooked developer who, significantly, betrays the town. It is in accepting her kindness that Sully belatedly grows up. Sexual relationships prove difficult in this book—affairs and marriages end rather than begin—but there is always companionship.

Russo being the sort of writer he is, most of that companionship is the hearty friendship of men in diners and bars and places of work. Because he is good on the damage that his men do to their families and themselves, he can get away with the moments of grace and courage that keep their matey ethic viable. Male bonding gets analysed as well as celebrated; Sully's employer Carl is caustic about the unconsciously homoerotic component of the relationship between Sully and his dim sidekick Rub. And the teasing game of mutual defrauding played by Carl and Sully has elements of flirtation. Attractively, there is nothing reductive about any of this.

Nobody's Fool is a thoroughly peopled book, though a few too many of the characters are caricatures. Russo's ear for social ritual and the comedy that goes with it is a good one, even if he is too prone to derive comedy from the grotesque humiliations of age and health. It is perhaps excessive to include both death by a falling cash register and the loss of an artificial leg in a poker game. If Russo is trying to imitate Dickens, this can be a mixed blessing; but he has learned Dickens' principal lesson, which is that the novel can usefully be about a complex moral world.