Author(s): Richard Russo

Fiction

Richard Russo, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made "Nobody s Fool "(1993)" "a confident, assured novel [that] sweeps the reader up, according to the" San Francisco Chronicle "back then." " Simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated. Or, as "The Boston Globe "put it, a big, rambunctious novel with endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness. " " The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist s estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren t "still" best friends . . . Sully s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who s obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might ve been about to run off with, "before" dying in a freak accident . . . Bath s mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then there s Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there s Charice Bond a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer s office as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station."Everybody s Fool "is filled with humor, heart, hard times and people you can t help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so stridently human. This is classic Russo and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time."