[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 the hilariously doomed attempt to restore the town's previous prosperity by convincing fast-buck financiers to build a theme park, The Ultimate Escape, in Bath. The reason the theme park is never built is that the money men ultimately decide that the Bath locals are simply too weird, and, if employed by the park, would scare off and otherwise disconcert the tourist trade.

Weird they are, and Russo's achievement is to invent a completely believable fictional landscape peopled with assorted charlatans, buffoons, and chronic underachievers, all of whom he succeeds in making us care passionately about through the sheer force of the narrative. His characters, like Samuel Beckett's, are inevitably falling down, but they always get up, only to fall down again. Russo would say it is not merely the getting up that makes people truly human, but the falling down as well. This dialectic between occasional triumph and inevitable catastrophe gives the book an unusual texture, both bleak and cheerful at the same time.