Reader delagar reminded me of how much I love Richard Russo, the only American writer who, in my opinion, writes the kind of literature that is not a waste of time. Russo wrote Nobody’s Fool in 1993 but the novel is scarily relevant to what is happening in the country right now.
Nobody’s Fool is a novel about men who fail. Its male characters belong to different age groups and professions, they have different levels of educational attainment but they all share an uncanny capacity to fail at absolutely everything. They fail as workers, professionals, husbands, fathers, friends, citizens, lovers, neighbors, even pet owners. And as soon as they are done failing, they start all over again.
The question that lies at the heart of this novel is whether readers will find these male characters quirky and endearing or if they will notice how casually but relentlessly these men take their frustrations out on women. Beaten, abused, jailed, humiliated, dead, discarded, and infected women are everywhere in the novel but the male characters don’t notice their suffering and only see them as obstacles to getting what they want whenever they want it. Readers will either subscribe to this vision of women or will manage to resist it.
This is a complex novel, and Russo brings to it another layer. His favorite subject that he keeps writing about is bad parents and the damage they unthinkingly inflict on their children. The novel is funny but it’s the kind of humor that covers up something so horrible, so degraded that a mere glimpse of it makes one recoil.
Highly recommended.
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