Everybody's Fool: A Novel

<b>Richard Russo, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made <i>Nobody's Fool </i>(1993) <i> </i>a &quot;confident, assured novel [that] sweeps the reader up,&quot; according to the<i> San Francisco Chronicle </i>back then<i>. </i>&quot;Simple as family love, yet nearly as complicated.&quot; Or, as <i>The Boston Globe </i>put it, &quot;a big, rambunctious novel with endless riffs and unstoppable human hopefulness.&quot;<i> <br></i></b><br> The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it's hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't <i>still</i> best friends . . . Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one) . We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who's obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might've been about to run off with, <i>before</i> dying in a freak accident . . . Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there's Charice Bond - a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer's office - as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.<br><i><br>Everybody's Fool </i>is filled with humor, heart, hard times and people you can't help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so stridently human. This is classic Russo - and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.