Ten years after Sully’s death, his son Peter is still in North Bath, looking more like his father every day. He teaches part time at the local college and with his dad’s old partner Rub does construction on the side. His son Will is abroad for college. Peter is wondering if it isn’t time to finally move on.
North Bath “had been circling the drain” for a long time. People blamed the Democrats for spending too much. Before that, the city’s “unofficial motto” was “No spending. Ever. On anything. For any purpose.” Now, it had been forced to merge with the wealthier Schuyler Springs, closing the police department and even the schools. Property values were plummeting.
Police Chief Doug Raymer was out of a job. He had come a long way over his career. He was “taking a break” in his marriage, his wife Charice assuming the police chief position in Schuyler Springs and moving there. As a woman and an African American, she is facing blow-back from some of the police–particularly the corrupt Delgado, who has a history of violence.
Charice’s twin brother Jerome has returned after the end of a love affair. She convinces Doug to take him in. Jerome has decided to forgo his usual natty look, hoping to alienate white women from falling in love with him.
Peter’s estranged son Thomas–Wacker when a kid–turns up out of the blue. Peter understands how Thomas feels about him, his own father Sully having abandoned him as a child. What Peter doesn’t know is that the life Thomas had with his ex was one of deprivation and instability. Thomas had plans to get back, but instead gets drunk and falls off the bar stool, and ends up on Delgado’s bad side.
As complications arise, all of the North Bath people you know and love from Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool are forced to reevaluate their decisions.
Sully’s married girlfriend Ruth still misses him although she regrets the damage their affair had on her daughter Janie. Janie has been dating Delgado, watchful for signs of violence. And her daughter Tina still carries a torch for Will Sullivan. Carl Roebuck has fulfilled Sully’s prediction and lost everything and moves in with Peter. His ex Toby is a successful business woman, and a sometimes lover of Peter’s.
The novel can be read without reading the previous novels in the North Bath series–especially if you have seen the movie version of Nobody’s Fool starring Paul Newman as Sully. But if you do, you will want to go back and read the previous novels! You can’t help but fall in love with these flawed, very real characters.
There are laugh-out-loud moments, suspense, and lots of deep dives into the characters’ psyches. The question is–Does Russo have one more North Bath novel left in him? We certainly hope so!
Thanks to A. A. Knopf for a free book.
Somebody’s Fool
by Richard Russo
by Knopf Publishing Group
Pub Date July 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780593317891 (ISBN10: 0593317890)
from the publisher
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and to the characters that captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of readers in his beloved best sellers Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool.
Ten years after the death of the magnetic Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the town of North Bath is going through a major transition as it is annexed by its much wealthier neighbor, Schuyler Springs. Peter, Sully’s son, is still grappling with his father’s tremendous legacy as well as his relationship to his own son, Thomas, wondering if he has been all that different a father than Sully was to him.
Meanwhile, the towns’ newly consolidated police department falls into the hands of Charice Bond, after the resignation of Doug Raymer, the former North Bath police chief and Charice’s ex-lover. When a decomposing body turns up in the abandoned hotel situated between the two towns, Charice and Raymer are drawn together again and forced to address their complicated attraction to one another. Across town, Ruth, Sully’s married ex-lover, and her daughter Janey struggle to understand Janey’s daughter, Tina, and her growing obsession with Peter’s other son, Will. Amidst the turmoil, the town’s residents speculate on the identity of the unidentified body, and wonder who among their number could have disappeared unnoticed.
Infused with all the wry humor and shrewd observations that Russo is known for, Somebody’s Fool is another classic from a modern master.
The Literate Quilter 