Recommendations
Books Like Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo
For readers of the great American comic novel of working-class life
If you loved Nobody's Fool — Sully Sullivan's stubbornness, his bad knee, his inability to do what would be good for him, the comedy of a man who is exactly himself in a world that has no use for that — these novels share the same quality: the great comic character who refuses to accommodate themselves to the world's expectations, and the working-class Northeast as the landscape of this resistance.
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Buy on AmazonEmpire Falls
by Richard Russo
The companion novel — Miles Roby in Empire Falls, Maine; broader and more ambitious than Nobody's Fool, the Pulitzer-winning partner; reading both gives the full scope of Russo's dying Northeast mill town portrait.
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Buy on AmazonStraight Man
by Richard Russo
Russo's most purely comic novel — Hank Devereaux at a Pennsylvania university; if Nobody's Fool is Russo's Dickens, Straight Man is his academic farce; the companion in his comedy.
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Buy on AmazonA Confederacy of Dunces
by John Kennedy Toole
Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece — Ignatius J. Reilly in New Orleans; the Southern grotesque companion in the tradition of the great American comic novel about a man who is exactly himself in a world that has no use for that; the most important companion in the comic tradition Nobody's Fool inhabits.
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Buy on AmazonThe Pickwick Papers
by Charles Dickens
Dickens's first novel — Mr. Pickwick's good-natured haplessness and his encounters with the world's absurdity are the Victorian English ancestor of Sully Sullivan; Nobody's Fool is Russo's Pickwick Papers, the novel in which his comic genius is most purely expressed.
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Buy on AmazonPlainsong
by Kent Haruf
Haruf's novel about a small Colorado plains town — the companion in the tradition of American fiction that finds dignity in ordinary working-class lives; Holt, Colorado's people are the Western plains version of North Bath's people, treated in a more lyrical register.
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Buy on AmazonBridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
Russo's most meditative novel — Lou Lynch in Thomaston, New York; the companion in his upstate New York fiction; less comic than Nobody's Fool but in the same world and with similar concerns about what it means to stay.
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Buy on AmazonThe Cider House Rules
by John Irving
Irving's great New England novel about Homer Wells at Dr. Larch's orphanage — the companion in American fiction about specific New England communities; where Nobody's Fool is comic, The Cider House Rules is moral; both are fundamentally about people who must figure out their obligations.
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Buy on AmazonEverybody's Fool
by Richard Russo
The direct sequel to Nobody's Fool — Sully in his 80s, still in North Bath, still himself; the essential continuation for readers who want to know what happened to Sully and the North Bath world.
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