Nobody's Fool

Acclaim for
Richard’s Russo’s
NOBODY’S FOOL
    â€œThe fun of this novel is in hearing these guys (and women) talk … they’re funny, quick and inventive. The novel’s tone has the same … intelligence as its characters.”
    â€”
The New York Times Book Review
    â€œReading this large, comfortable, good-natured novel … feels great.… [It] teems with local characters … richly conceived and drawn so lovingly that you can’t help but like them.”
    â€”
Philadelphia Inquirer
    â€œ[Sully is] reminiscent, in a way, of Bellow’s old men.… One never tires of watching him, because he has the capacity to make everyone around him feel better, including the reader.”
    â€”
The New Yorker
    â€œFew novelists plow this soil with more even-handed ease and naturalness than Russo.… He demonstrates a rare ability to find affection for even his most empty [characters] while questioning the choices of those he most values.… His success in keeping us involved is especially impressive.”
    â€”
Chicago Sun-Times
    â€œ
Nobody’s Fool is a
giant hard-edged comedy, a Flannery O’Connor story taken north and gone ballistic.… Russo’s smart prose gives Sully’s, and everyone else’s, dim propsects a witty, allegorical weight.”
    â€”
Mirabella
    â€œRichard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small town America.… He is compulsively readable.… Alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos, he captures with perfection the pulse of small-town life and the rhythm of dramatically changing seasons.… His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they also are human.”
    â€”
Houston Chronicle
    â€œAn intelligently drawn portrait … What has made Russo’s work so consistently compelling is the depth of character, the richness of life.”
    â€”
Minneapolis Star Tribune

ALSO BY RICHARD RUSSO
    The Risk Pool

Mohawk

Straight Man

Empire Falls

The Whore’s Child and Other Stories

Richard Russo
NOBODY’S FOOL
    Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels:
Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man
, and
Empire Falls
, and a collection of stories,
The Whore’s Child
.



FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 1994
    Copyright
©
1993 by Richard Russo
    All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Random House, Inc., New York, in 1993.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Russo, Richard, 1949–
Nobody’s fool / Richard Russo. — 1st Vintage Contemporaries ed.
p. cm.
Reprint. Previously published: New York: Random House, ©1993.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80992-6
1. City and town life—New York (State)—Fiction. I. Title.
[PS3568.U812N6 1994]
813′ .54—dc20        93-42193
    Author photograph © Jere DeWaters
    v3.1

FOR JEAN LEVARN FINDLAY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    The author gratefully acknowledges generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Thanks also to Linda Stuart and Alan Rancourt for advice on technical matters. Gratitude as well for coffee and understanding to the staffs of Cristaudos and Denny’s in Carbondale and The Open Hearth in Waterville. And, for priceless faith and encouragement, my dearest thanks to Nat Sobel, Judith Weber, Craig Holden, David Rosenthal and, always, my wife, Barbara.



WEDNESDAY

    U pper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it—although Main, from its “lower” end by the IGA and Tastee Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter