Will I love Nobody's Fool?

I had put off reading this book for years because the movie version with Paul Newman had resonated with me for a long time. I wanted to come to it as fresh as I could. I've read a lot of Russo, and I think this is him at the peak of his powers. Deeply imagined characters who are true to life in a run-down world that is too true to life. I have no trouble believing these people lived and breathed and carried on their lives in a world as rich as mine.

You open a novel and begin reading. The author’s voice draws you into a story that leaves you feeling bereft at the end because it’s over. Wanting more, you read all the writer’s other titles, then reread the first one again.

Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool is such a book, despite its eponymous main character, the aging loser, sixty-year-old Donald Sullivan, someone whose life is such a mess that his landlord, Miss Beryl, once Sully’s eighth grade teacher, is the only one harboring any hope he may yet redeem himself.

From such unpromising material, Russo crafts an engaging story that has… show more.