Humour in small town misery
Richard Russo’s follow-up to Nobody’s Fool is peopled with all the quirky weirdos you could hope to meet, finds
Pity local police chief Douglas Raymer. His wife tripped on a carpet, fell downstairs, smashed her skull open and died. This is devastating enough, except that Raymer finds a note from her saying she was leaving him for another man. Then, in her car, he discovers the type of remote control that opens garage doors. It doesn’t belong to him or to his late wife.
Could it belong to his wife’s lover? The only way he can answer that question is by wandering forlornly around the town, pointing the damned thing at random garages and seeing if it will open one. This is the opening gambit of
Everybody’s Fool, and at once you get the flavour of what Richard Russo does so well. Black comedy mixed with pathos and a strong sense of the despair and drabness of small-town life.
Everybody’s Fool is set in North Bath, a malodorous town in upstate New York with a sewer problem. The type of town tourists avoid, peopled with ‘‘deadbeat dads, disability scam artists, derelicts and assorted dickheads’’, as the author describes half the clientele of the local bar.
And yet, for all the misery of their unfulfilled lives, there are decent people in this town trying to get along, even if their prospects are grim.
The blurb and various puffs tell me that Everybody’s Fool is a kind of sequel to Nobody’s Fool, which Pulitzer Prizewinning Russo wrote 24 years ago. I haven’t read Nobody’s Fool, but I don’t think it matters. Complete unto itself, Everybody’s
Fool has a big cast of characters. Police chief Raymer’s troubles are only one strand of plot.
As compelling is the anxious love-life of ‘‘Sully’’ (Donald Sullivan) whose mistress is his good friend’s wife.
Or the local entrepreneur and conartist Carl Roebuck, trying to make a profit on dodgy buildings.
Or Charice, the African-American woman cop who has a thing for chief Raymer, but uses Benedick-andBeatrice banter to hide it.
Or, for sheer nastiness, the crim Roy Purdy, who returns from jail to resume his career of terrorising locals and beating up women.
And these are only a few of the main characters. Across nearly 480 pages skip dozens of supporting cast, often grotesques and figures of fun.
The novel’s humour is distinctly American in idiom, but I kept thinking of Dickens, and not only because there’s a supporting character called Squeers.
Like the canonical author, Richard Russo has the knack of dealing with what is squalid and mean and yet making it funny. There’s homicide, there’s the exhumation of a corpse, there are poisonous snakes loose in town, and we still come up laughing. Could the message be that people on the margins survive life by laughing at it?
The structure’s a bit baggy, with important material introduced late in the plot; and the ending comes close to a conventional romantic clinch. But, dammit, Dickens was often guilty of those things too.
Score this one as a very full, very satisfying read, about people who aren’t really too different from ourselves, if we’re honest.