Russo's 'Everybody's Fool': Entertainment, pure and simple

nolead begins By Richard Russo

Knopf. 485 pp. $27.95

nolead ends nolead begins

Reviewed by Bob Hoover

In the alternative universe of the novel, the universe without an alternative, i.e., the actual world, seldom intrudes unless the novelist is able to reflect one within the other.

Richard Russo's hermetically sealed novels roll without even a distant signal from real life. Set vaguely in the recent past, the books are concerned chiefly with his world of underclass white folks whose thoughts center largely on themselves.

Someone's depressed, someone's lonely, someone's angry, another is lustful, and most of them are often drunk or high, but Russo takes his working-class characters seriously. Few novelists honor the white working class as much as he does. We feel we have met these people, if indeed we're not one of them ourselves.

His new novel is a sequel to his popular Nobody's Fool, published in 1993. The cast of characters hasn't changed; it's just 10 years older. The primary characters are still stuck in fictional North Bath, N.Y., a decaying former resort village outclassed by nearby Schuyler Springs, which is Russo's name for Saratoga Springs.

Returning are the charming Donald "Sully" Sullivan, now 70 and prosperous, thanks to winning racing bets and a dead benefactor; Ruth, his onetime mistress and diner proprietor; Rub Squeers, Sully's friend and perhaps the least-interesting character in contemporary fiction; and Douglas Raymer, now the town's police chief, who's mourning his dead wife.

There are many more, and I suggest you write them down as they emerge. The list will allow you to read on without flipping back to remember who they are.

Raymer has replaced Sully at center stage, a basic Russo good guy burdened with doubts and the resulting sense of male inadequacy. The deceased Becka (she fell downstairs while fleeing the marriage) obsesses him, pressing Raymer to the edge of emotional collapse.

Everybody's Fool drags Raymer along the always-bumpy road of self-discovery - which includes fainting into an open grave, crashing off a second-story porch, perhaps struck by lightning, hearing voices, and blood poisoning.

Sully, though, continues to cruise along despite an ailing heart, still his incorrigible, endearing self, and still in love with the long-suffering Ruth and her troubled family, including her junkman husband and dangerous ex-son-in-law.

Into his all-Caucasian lineup, Russo introduces two African Americans: Charice, the police dispatcher, and her brother Jerome, a Schuyler Springs cop. And in the ancient literary device that grants people of color spiritual insight into the clueless minds of white people, they bring much-needed understanding and patience.

Charice is there for the distraught police chief, who needs a friend as North Bath descends into chaos. Russo delivers a dozen roller-coaster plot lines with waggish humor and clever dialogue. His characters might be running short of cash, but they have an endless supply of scatological and snarky conversation.

Now and then, mostly with his minor female characters, does Russo reveal a little snobbery toward these lesser human beings, who live in squalor and are burdened with too much weight, too little beauty, and apparently even less intelligence.

Still, the result is entertainment, pure and simple. You can put Everybody's Fool down confident that it holds no deep insights or intellectual weight to trouble you - and, more important, that you don't live in Richard Russo's world.

Bob Hoover is the retired book editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.