Review: New fool takes over but he's just like the old one in 'Somebody's Fool'

One of the great knuckleheads in recent American fiction lies dead early in Richard Russo's new novel. Will Donald "Sully" Sullivan's hardscrabble town ever be the same?

Readers met the incurably sarcastic, erratically employed, occasionally sober Sully in Russo's great 1993 comic novel "Nobody's Fool." The aging barfly's decline mirrored that of his hometown, where, as Russo noted in the sequel "Everybody's Fool," once-busy factories had been colonized by rats.

A war veteran and worse-for-wear manual laborer, Sully, like Russo's fictional North Bath, N.Y., has seen better days. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his Maine novel "Empire Falls," but he's best known for Sully, memorably portrayed by Paul Newman, an Oscar nominee for the film "Nobody's Fool."

Now, in "Somebody's Fool," an ensemble-cast character study wed to a minor-key mystery, heart failure claims Sully before page 20. He nevertheless fuels the plot, leaving his son Peter a "long list of people his father had asked him to check on from time to time."

First up is Rub Squeers. Sully's unusually named sidekick is so sad that he weeps at the sight of jelly doughnuts, a snack they used to share. Peter helps Rub pay his bills and gets him a cellphone. But Peter soon has his own troubles.

A middle-aged academic and part-time journalist, Peter is estranged from two of his three sons. One estrangee, Tom, a thug from out of state, fills his car with cans of gasoline and heads for Peter's place. What's he planning?

Alongside this story line is one featuring Douglas Raymer and Charice Bond, cops, lovers and major characters in previous "Fool" novels. Though their town isn't "any more racist than the rest of America," their interracial romance riles local bigots. Her promotion to police chief leaves Charice, who is Black, feeling particularly vulnerable.

When one of Charice's officers, a repulsive bully, has a run-in with a mouthy stranger — Tom — the stories intersect in bloody fashion. Meanwhile, a corpse is found at an abandoned hotel marked for redevelopment, a mystery around which Charice, Peter and others converge.

Like Sully, many of these characters are goodhearted screw-ups. Russo lavishes them with up-close attention. We eavesdrop as Peter reveals his blithe self-regard, Charice frets that she's been set up to fail and Rub worries he'll die alone.

Comic predicaments lighten the tone. Running for office, Doug distributes stacks of misprinted campaign flyers — "We're Not Happy Until You're Not Happy" — before he spots the error.

Late in "Somebody's Fool," an elderly woman describes her daughter — and by inference, several of Russo's characters — as essentially good yet "trapped" by circumstance and bad choices. Like its predecessors, this book lands as an authentic, ambivalent ode to America's small towns — where, like everywhere else, progress occurs at a fitful pace.

Regular Star Tribune contributor Kevin Canfield's next review is of "Family Lore."

Somebody's Fool

By: Richard Russo.

Publisher: Knopf, 464 pages, $29.