Everybody’s Fool is set 10 years after Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, in the same run down town in upper state New York:
Nobody’s Fool
Of course in Bath, a spa town whose waters have run dry, little has changed. The characters’ lives run along the same rails, set down by their genes and their cultural inheritance. But now the main focus shifts from Sully, the working class anti-hero of the previous novel, to Raymer, the hallucinating Chief of Police.
Once again we meet Sully’s long time lover Ruth, and her loyal husband Zack. There is Sully’s workmate, Rub, and the bar and cafe which are the focus of local life. There have been deaths – including Wirf, Sully’s one legged lawyer friend, and Mrs Peoples, his one time 8th grade teacher, who was Raymer’s teacher too.
But there are new additions, such as the crazy dog, licking its sore balls, and peeing over the inside of his van, cruelly named by Sully after his friend Rub. Or Charice, Raymer’s assistant, and sister of his best man, Jerome Bond. Charice, allegedly with a butterfly tattoo on her backside, is ultra efficient, and so essential to the functioning of the police department that Raymer can never allow her to leave the safety of the office and actually do police work.
There is Mr Smith the mysterious arch criminal trading in drugs and poisonous snakes, Raymer’s wife, dead now, Gus’s wife Alice, mentally unstable, and her cruel former partner, Kurt. Russo is so inventive, creating characters that step off the page full of energy and life, stupid, ignorant, foolish, greedy, cruel or mad as a snake. This is a violent world, and an ugly one too, but the cruel violence of the worst characters sits alongside a quiet compassion and forgiveness that might be unexpected in Bath.
Everybody’s Fool has elements of a Greek tragedy, in that the events take place pretty much in a 24 hour period, and we never leave the twin towns of Bath and Shuyler, so there’s unity of time and place for you. But there’s no real unity of plot, as several different stories are interlaced cleverly in alternating cliffhanging chapters in a way that’s more typical of a soap opera.
The close knit relationships, the betrayals and lusts for power, the focus on madness and sanity have all the grandeur and reach of tragedy. It’s a dramatic story, that opens at a graveside, and is lit by the lightening of a summer storm. Its heroes are ordinary men, not Greek soldiers or kings, but they engage with all the universal questions. Russo has real courage in dealing with the big subjects, often taboos in fact – death, mental illness – as well as the more common themes of sex, adultery, love and friendship, where he also pulls no punches.
If this is a tragedy, it’s a Shakespearean one, full of dark comic interludes and base characters, at times unrepentant, and with base desires. There is so much to laugh at, and I laughed out loud frequently, so it’s easy to see the book as a sort of literal Comédie Humaine: all life is here, in Bath.
I really recommend Everybody’s Fool, and will probably read some more of Russo’s books, but I did think the ending was a bit too comfortable. The novel provides a bleak vision of the world, and there is a sort of darkness at its heart – it’s a very black kind of humour and no one is safe from death, crime or corruption. Without giving too much away I’d just expected a more brutal and less compromising last thirty pages, one that reflected more the harsh world Russo describes.
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