Nobody''s Fool (Sully #1)
About
About the Author Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool, Straight Man, and Empire Falls, and a collection of stories, The Whore’s Child.From the Trade Paperback edition. Product Description A major motion picture from Paramount Pictures starring Paul Newman, Melanie Griffith, and Jessica Tandy.Richard Russo’s slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York — and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years.Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father’s footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity’s follies as well as its triumphs. Nobody’s Fool is storytelling at its most generous.Kevin Spacey won the Tony Award for his performance in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” and has starred in the films The Ref, Iron Will, Consenting Adults and Glengarry Glen Ross. From the Inside Flap on picture from Paramount Pictures starring Paul Newman, Melanie Griffith, and Jessica Tandy.Richard Russo’s slyly funny and moving novel follows the unexpected operation of grace in a deadbeat town in upstate New York — and in the life of one of its unluckiest citizens, Sully, who has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years.Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheartedly with another man’s, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with: a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father’s footsteps. With its sly and uproarious humor and a heart that embraces humanity’s follies as well as its triumphs. Nobody’s Fool is storytelling at its most generous.Kevin Spacey won the Tony Award for his performance in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers,” and has starred in the films The Ref, Iron Will, Consenting Adults and Glengarry Glen Ross. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. WEDNESDAYUpper Main Street in the village of North Bath, just above the town’s two-block-long business district, was quietly residential for three more blocks, then became even more quietly rural along old Route 27A, a serpentine two-lane blacktop that snaked its way through the Adirondacks of northern New York, with their tiny, down-at-the-heels resort towns, all the way to Montreal and prosperity. The houses that bordered Upper Main, as the locals referred to it-although Main, from its “lower” end by the IGA and Tastee Freez through its upper end at the Sans Souci, was less than a quarter mile-were mostly dinosaurs, big, aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been worth some money if they were across the border in Vermont and if they had not been built as, or converted into, two- and occasionally three-family dwellings and rented out, over several decades, as slowly deteriorating flats. The most impressive feature of Upper Main was not its houses, however, but the regiment of ancient elms, whose upper limbs arched over the steeply pitched roofs of these elderly houses, as well as the street below, to green cathedral effect, bathing the street in breeze-blown shadows that masked the peeling paint and rendered the sloping porches and crooked caves of the houses quaint in their decay. City people on their way north, getting off the interstate in search of food and fuel, often slowed as they drove through the village and peered nostalgically out their windows at the old houses, wondering idly what they cost and what they must be like inside and what it would be like to live in them and walk to the village in the shade. Surel
Unchaptered
p. 131
Rhythm was what Sully had counted on over the long years—that and the wisdom to understand that no job, no matter how thankless or stupid or backbreaking, could not be gotten through. The clock moved if you let it.
p. 135
…pain could have a cumulative effect. Your ability to withstand it had much to do with your ability to catch your breath between its assaults.
p. 443
The more he thought about it, life’s truest meanings were all childhood meanings, childhood understanding of how things worked, what they were. Do we ever know as deeply as we know in childhood? Does adult life amount to anything more than a futile attempt to invalidate the deepest truths we know about ourselves and the world?