Reading Order
Nobody's Fool Reading Order
Nobody's Fool (1993) by Richard Russo is the novel that established him as a major American writer and one of the great comic novels of the American Northeast — the story of Sully Sullivan, a 60-year-old handyman and laborer in North Bath, New York, a dying mill town in the Adirondack foothills, who refuses to grow up, refuses to plan ahead, and refuses to take seriously anything that deserves to be taken seriously. The novel covers one late-autumn week in North Bath: Sully's various jobs and lawsuits, his relationship with his landlady Miss Beryl, his son Peter's troubled marriage, his ex-wife Vera and her husband Ralph, his best friend Rub, and his employer Carl Roebuck, who is both his boss and his nemesis. Nobody's Fool is one of the funniest novels in American literature — the comedy of Sully's specific kind of stubbornness, his working-class wisdom, his inability to do what would be good for him, and the comic mismatch between his self-image (he sees himself as a man who gets by) and his actual situation (he is broke, injured, and nearly 60 with no retirement plan) is sustained across 500 pages without losing energy. The novel was adapted into a 1994 film with Paul Newman (who plays Sully) that is one of the few literary adaptations where Newman's performance exceeded the character as written.
Where to start
Nobody's Fool — any Vintage paperback. Perfect entry point for Russo — tighter and more focused than Empire Falls, and the comedy is uninterrupted. Empire Falls (2001) is the companion and the Pulitzer winner.
Complete Nobody's Fool Book List
- 1Buy
Nobody's Fool
Richard Russo·1993·The novel — Sully Sullivan's week in North Bath, New York; his jobs, lawsuits, son, ex-wife, nemesis Carl Roebuck; one of the great American comic novels and the perfect entry to Russo's fiction. - 2Buy
Empire Falls
Richard Russo·2001·The Pulitzer Prize-winning companion novel — Miles Roby in Empire Falls, Maine; broader and more ambitious than Nobody's Fool; the two novels together constitute Russo's definitive statement about the dying Northeast mill town. - 3Buy
Straight Man
Richard Russo·1997·Russo's most purely comic novel — Hank Devereaux at a Pennsylvania university; the academic companion to his small-town fiction; if Nobody's Fool is his Dickens, Straight Man is his academic farce. - 4Buy
The Risk Pool
Richard Russo·1988·Russo's second novel — the earlier portrait of the same upstate New York world in Mohawk; the companion in his mill-town fiction and more autobiographical than Nobody's Fool. - 5Buy
Bridge of Sighs
Richard Russo·2007·Russo's most meditative novel — Lou Lynch in Thomaston, New York, across fifty years; the companion in his upstate New York fiction, more serious and less immediately comic than Nobody's Fool. - 6Buy
The Pickwick Papers
Charles Dickens·1837·Dickens's first novel — the comic picaresque that is Nobody's Fool's most important ancestor; Mr. Pickwick's good-natured haplessness and his encounters with the world's absurdity are the Victorian English version of Sully's 20th-century American version of the same character. - 7Buy
A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole·1980·Toole's posthumous comic masterpiece — the companion in the tradition of the great American comic novel; Ignatius J. Reilly's New Orleans encounters are the Southern, more grotesque version of Sully's North Bath encounters; both novels are fundamentally about a man who is exactly himself in a world that has no use for that. - 8Buy
Plainsong
Kent Haruf·1999·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 in specific American places; Holt, Colorado's people are the Western plains version of North Bath's people.
Nobody's Fool — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Nobody's Fool about?
Nobody's Fool follows Sully Sullivan across one week in late November in North Bath, New York, a dying Adirondack foothills mill town. Sully is 60, has a bad knee (result of a construction accident), lives in a rented apartment from his 80-year-old landlady Miss Beryl (the widow of his former teacher), and works irregular jobs for Carl Roebuck, a contractor who is also his nemesis. The week includes: a lawsuit Sully is both a plaintiff and defendant in, his son Peter's arrival with his wife and kids (Peter is having a crisis about his marriage and his life), various mishaps with Carl Roebuck's property and person, his friendship with his companion Rub Squeers, and his on-again off-again relationship with Toby Roebuck (Carl's wife, whom he has been intermittently sleeping with).
What makes Sully Sullivan such a great character?
Sully Sullivan is one of the great characters in American fiction because he is exactly himself at all times — stubbornly, completely, and often self-defeatingly himself. He refuses to plan ahead, refuses to save money, refuses to acknowledge that his knee is bad enough to prevent him from working, refuses to grow up, refuses to do what would be good for him in any conventional sense. But Russo is careful to show that Sully's stubbornness is not mere stupidity — it is a form of integrity, a refusal to participate in the middle-class project of self-improvement and deferred gratification that the novel's other characters, in their various ways, have bought into. Sully is who he is, entirely, and the novel treats that with both comedy and respect.
Why is Nobody's Fool set in a dying mill town?
Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, a town whose economy was built on leather gloves manufacturing and that declined as the glove industry moved elsewhere — a specific example of the de-industrialization that has affected much of the Northeast. Russo has said that growing up in a town like that shapes a person's sense of what is possible and what is permanent, and that his fiction returns to this world because it is the world he understands. The dying mill town is not just background for Russo's comedy — it is the economic and social condition that shapes the characters: why Sully hasn't left, why the opportunities he might have had never materialized, why a man of his intelligence and capability is still doing irregular construction work at 60.
Is there a sequel to Nobody's Fool?
Yes — Russo published Everybody's Fool in 2016, a sequel set in North Bath twenty years after Nobody's Fool. The sequel is not as perfectly executed as the original — nobody expected it to be — but it gives readers who love Sully the chance to see him in his 80s, still himself, still in North Bath. Empire Falls (2001) is not a sequel but is the companion novel in the same fictional world.
What should I read after Nobody's Fool?
After Nobody's Fool, Empire Falls (2001) is the companion and Pulitzer-winning novel. Straight Man (1997) is Russo's most comic novel after Nobody's Fool. Everybody's Fool (2016) is the direct sequel. For American comic novels in the same tradition, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces is the essential companion. For American fiction about dying mill towns, Richard Price's Clockers and Tom Perrotta's The Leftovers are important companions.
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