Featured Reading Guide
Richard Russo
It is Thanksgiving in North Bank and Sully, old Miss Beryl’s feckless lodger, does not have much to be thankful for. His arthritic knee is acting up and so is his truck; moreover, his ex-wife is at the end of her tether, his mistress is giving him the cold shoulder, the grinning ghost of his father won’t leave him alone, and Carl Roebuck refuses to pay him for a trench he dug last summer. The future looks bleak when Sully’s son Peter, a morose college professor, returns, offering Sully a chance to address a lifetime of neglected responsibilities and threatening his carefree existence.
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Richard Russo lives in Camden, Maine with his wife and two daughters. He is the author (and co-screenwriter) of Nobody’s Fool which was made into a major film starring Paul Newman. Film rights to his latest novel Empire Falls have also been bought.
topAbout the Book
It is Thanksgiving in North Bank and Sully, old Miss Beryl’s feckless lodger, does not have much to be thankful for. His arthritic knee is acting up and so is his truck; moreover, his ex-wife is at the end of her tether, his mistress is giving him the cold shoulder, the grinning ghost of his father won’t leave him alone, and Carl Roebuck refuses to pay him for a trench he dug last summer. The future looks bleak when Sully’s son Peter, a morose college professor, returns, offering Sully a chance to address a lifetime of neglected responsibilities and threatening his carefree existence.
topRichard Russo interview/review
- When you start a novel, what’s the first thing that you latch onto?
First I have to have a character worth caring about. In Nobody’s Fool, I knew when I started that book I’d be able to live happily with Sully for the three or four years that it would take to write the book. I tend not to start writing books about people I don’t have a lot of sympathy for because I’m just going to be with them too long. If I have to spend too much of my life with characters I don’t like, I don’t enjoy it, and I assume nobody else will, either.
Once you have that character worth caring about, I have to find a dilemma that the character doesn’t know how to resolve and that I don’t really have an answer for either. Sully’s a man who spent all of his life doing hard physical labor of one sort or other. It’s all he really knows how to do, and it gives his life a strange kind of texture that he likes. He enjoys doing that kind of work, even though he grouses about doing it.
When he falls off that ladder and shatters his knee, before the novel begins, he can’t work that way anymore. But he also can’t not work. It’s just not in him. He’s not the kind of man who can go back to school and learn another skill. For him to be working on that damaged knee is crazy, but for him not working is equally crazy. It takes away the one thing that makes him who he is. And I had no idea how that was going to be resolved when I started.
topStarting Points for Discussion
- The novel’s title refers to its protagonist, Donald Sullivan. Why is Sully so insistent in remaining nobody’s fool? How has this determination affected his relationships with other people?
- From the beginning we know that Sully has a bad knee and his refusal to treat it generates many of the novel’s complications. In what ways does this injury resonate with the novel’s themes?
- Sully’s string of misfortunes may also be due to bad luck or malign predestination. Is he destined to be unlucky? To what extent are his actions and character predetermined?
- How would you characterise Russo’s portrayal of relations between the sexes, and why are most of his characters divorced, widowed or unhappily married?
- How does the surrogate mother/son relationship between Sully and Beryl compare with Beryl’s relationship with her real son Clive? Do you see the antagonism between Clive and Sully as an extension of their childhood rivalry for the affections of Beryl’s late husband?
- What role does class play in this novel? To what extent are its characters shaped by economic circumstances?
Other Books by Richard Russo
Bridge of Sighs
Two boys grow up in Thomaston, upstate New York. Louis Charles Lynch, aka Lucy,…
Empire Falls
History and humanity flow through Empire Falls, Maine, like the strange flotsam…
Mohawk
Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the…
Straight Man
Hank Devereaux, a fifty-year-old, one-time novelist now serving as temporary…
That Old Cape Magic
Jack and Joy Griffin are back on Cape Cod – where they spent their hope-filled…
The Risk Pool: Re-jacket
THE RISK POOL is a thirty-year journey through the lives of Sam Hall, Mohawk’s…
Suggested Further Reading
- They Came Like Swallows ~ William Maxwell
- The Sportswriter ~ Richard Ford
- Cathedral ~ Raymond Carver
- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café ~ Fannie Flagg
- The Cider House Rules ~ John Irving
- Eddie’s Bastard ~ William Kowalski