Nobody’s Fool by Richard Russo

I’ve been told by a reputable source that this book can be really hard to get into. And it really does lack any of those clingy hooks that make you feel committed to finishing a book whether you like it or not. It’s unrelentingly smooth, actually, with Russo rubbing the edges off the moments of drama by doing things like removing the main characters from the moment or even removing the event from the direct line of the narrative: instead of handing the reader a scene with an angry husband, a rifle and some punching, Russo literally stops the narration just before anything happens, and only shares the resulting chaos in ensuing casual conversations among the characters, and when something does finally happen at the horsetrack, our protagonist is in jail and misses the whole event. Although they’re all eventually revealed to us in the slow but inexorable way that gossip moves, we miss out on a steamy phone call between a mother and her son’s mistress, more than one affair and a death and only learn retrospectively about a little boy’s penis getting slammed by a toilet seat.
So it’s not that nothing happens, so much, as that the protagonist, a kind of charming and kind of jerky, down on his luck 60-something jack-of-all trades named Sully, doesn’t really see the point in worrying about it when big things do happen. He slips from mishap to mishap, occasionally punctuated by a bout of good luck and usually dulled by a steady diet of beer and greasy spoon food and often commented on by the townspeople who either despair of, rely on, or dismay of his very presence. I found the lack of self interest, on the part of Sully and on the part of the book as a whole, utterly charming – although it didn’t hurt that I know that he was played by Paul Newman in the movie, and nothing says charming like Paul Newman, RIP. It’s not a book worth slogging through, but only because slogging is so antithetical to the very nature of the book.