Nobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 560
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0679753338
Publisher: Vintage
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are
intended to enhance your group's reading of Richard Russo's Nobody's
Fool. We hope that they will provide you with different ways of looking
at--and talking about--a novel whose size, opulence of character and description,
broad social canvas, and sheer narrative zest suggest the books of Dickens,
John Irving, and Anne Tyler. Amid the whip-crack repartee and wildly proliferating
subplots, readers will also discover a serious exploration of the sometimes
nourishing, sometimes strangling ties between fathers and sons; a bittersweet
homage to America's obsolescing small towns, and a ruefully wise take
on what earlier writers called predestination and grace and what Russo's
characters experience as plain dumb luck.
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1. This novel's title, Nobody's
Fool, is a punning reference to its protagonist, Donald Sullivan,
who at age 60 is "divorced from his own wife, carrying on halfheartedly
with another man's, estranged from his son, devoid of self-knowledge,
badly crippled and virtually unemployable--all of which he stubbornly
confuse[s] with independence." Why is Sully so insistent on remaining
nobody's fool? How has this determination affected his relationships
with other people?
2. One consequence of Sully's
prickly autonomy is his tendency to go off on "stupid streaks." Is Sully
a stupid man? How would you evaluate a freedom whose defining characteristic
seems to be the freedom to do the wrong thing at the wrong time?
3. From the beginning we know
that Sully has a bad knee, and his refusal to treat--or even favor--it
generates many of the novel's complications. In what ways does this
injury resonate with the novel's themes?
4. Sully's string of misfortunes
may also be due to bad luck or malign predestination. Is he destined
to be unlucky? To what extent are his actions and character predetermined?
5. Sully's father brutalized
him as a child. Sully deserted his son, Peter. Peter abandoned his timid
eldest son, Will, to the mercies of his sociopathic little brother.
What causes does the author posit for this four-generation history of
cruelty and neglect?
6. Perhaps to compensate for
Sully's brutal father, Russo supplies Sully with a very good, if somewhat
sharp-tongued, surrogate mother, Beryl Peoples. She may, in fact, be
the most real and enduring attachment Sully has. How does their relationship
compare with Beryl's relationship with her real son, Clive, Jr.? How
is the antagonism between Clive and Sully an extension of their childhood
rivalry for the affections of Beryl's late husband?
7. How would you characterize
Russo's portrayal of relations between the sexes, and why are most of
his characters divorced, widowed, or unhappily married?
8. The sudden flashes of good
luck (or simple happiness) that illuminate Sully's life and the lives
of other characters may be attributable to grace, which The Random
House Dictionary of the English Language defines as "the influence
or spirit of God operating in humans to regenerate or strengthen them."
At what moments does grace seem to operate in this novel?
9. Nobody's Fool is
also a novel about a town, North Bath, New York, whose misfortunes,
like Sully's, may be due to collective stupidity or fate. Even North
Bath's venerable elms now constitute a threat to its communal life and
property. In what ways do the novel's principal locales--Hattie's, the
OTB, and the White Horse--function as a microcosm of the town as a whole?
To what extent are North Bath's decline and grandiose visions of renewal
symptomatic of the political and economic climate of America in the
1980s?
10. What role does class play
in this novel? To what extent are its characters shaped by economic
circumstances?
11. One critic has described
Nobody's Fool as "a sad novel camouflaged in comedy." How is
this true? What is the nature of the book's sadness? How does Russo
balance his comic and tragic impulses?
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