Consider Everybody’s Fool a delightful return to form...It’s fitting that this book’s eye-catching cover depicts a dog with a lot of personality — and some signage discreetly hiding its nether parts. That dog represents a real character who’s just as rascally and perverse as the book’s humans. The dog is just better at expressing himself. Mr. Russo’s people prefer to sideswipe, wisecrack, sneak, scheme and talk to figments of their imaginations. It’s a joy to spend time with any of them, two-legged or four.
These scenes are Russo at his best, and they’re what make him of one of our best humorists (his campus farce Straight Man is one of the funniest novels of the ’90s)...This isn’t to suggest that Russo is only out for laughs. There are several harrowing confrontations in these pages, none of which end in predictable fashion, and virtually every character is wounded in one way or another. Everybody’s Fool is a decidedly bittersweet affair, a sequel that proves both entertaining and elegiac.
Three dead — and we’re just getting started. But that’s the abiding wonder of Russo’s novel, which bears down on two calamitous days and exploits the action in every single minute. From the cemetery, this ramshackle plot quickly starts grabbing at mudslides, grave robbery, collapsing buildings, poisonous snakes, drug deals, arson, lightning strikes and toxic goo. North Bath is a sleepy little town that never sleeps...That’s a testament to Russo’s narrative skill, which keeps all of these characters careening through a long book devoted to a very short period of time. His success stems largely from the fact that no tangent ever feels tangential in these pages, even if Russo sometimes leans too heavily on his sad-sack shtick.
Everybody should read Everybody’s Fool...As the lives intertwine and the story evolves, the chief’s tale takes a more prominent role, and if some twists are too telegraphed, others surprise. It’s a joyous ride to the moment the chief decides 'it’s a shame, not a crime, to be unequal to the most important tasks you’re given.'’’
As good as Russo was in 1993, he's even better now. And Everybody's Fool is a delight...In the novel's two-day time span, there will be enough bizarre events, startling revelations, unlikely heroes and touching moments to supply a dozen small towns. Although Everybody's Fool, like all of Russo's fiction, is driven by engaging and believable characters, he is also a master of plotting, from cliffhangers to twists that deftly link apparently unrelated threads. This book's tone is largely comic, but Russo writes with uncommon insight about love, families and friendship.
...the humor is essentially benign, genial, and it works in service of the characters. Sully in particular emerges as one of the most credible and engaging heroes in recent American fiction. At times, however, this sequel feels unfocused, the plot drifts and the tenor of that humor verges dangerously close to that of the sitcom, especially in the scenes between Sully and Rub, and those involving Charice’s brother, Jerome, and Raymer...Nonetheless, taken together, at over 1,000 pages, the two Fool books represent an enormous achievement, creating a world as richly detailed as the one we step into each day of our lives.
For all its pleasures, however, Everybody’s Fool is a sequel, with a sequel’s repetitions. Mr. Russo revisits greatest hits, retelling in capsule form stories of Sully and son’s doping of a Doberman at a construction yard and a teenager’s impalement on a wrought-iron fence. He brings back old jokes, including Sully’s relentless teasing of foolish Rub. And he trots out bit players that were entertaining in and crucial to the previous novel but are superfluous here...More worrisome are early signs that, like all sequels, this one will compensate for lack of invention—most of the characters and their fictional world having already been built—with amped-up action.
Russo isn’t as in tune with the female characters of North Bath, but his love for all its misfits sings with every line of whip-smart dialogue. For fans who’ve missed Sully and the gang, Everybody’s Fool is like hopping on the last empty barstool surrounded by old friends.
Reading Russo’s latest is like spending time with a friendly gossip, a chatty observer who is above all interested in the doings of ordinary folk. In the hands of a less empathetic author, the recounting of the various stymied lives of Bath’s residents would come off as a skewering of small-town life. While Russo is often winking, he is never judgmental. Though the events of Everybody’s Fool are interesting and colorful, the book’s power comes less from following any one character’s journey and more from rendering the portrait of an entire community, in all its romance and all its grit.
[The] broadening of viewpoints can make the plot feel more diffuse, especially since not every character holds readers’ attentions as well as the two fools of the piece. But, from the physical comedy to the comeuppances, Russo, who knows where every barrel of toxic waste is buried in town, remains ultimately in control of his big-hearted, calloused novel. The characters may never figure out how to prepare ramps, but this tourist will always welcome a chance to drop back in on North Bath.
Despite its promise and subject matter, Barnes' novel is a disappointing mishmash of ponderous essayistic musings and standard biographical material on Shostakovich ... Barnes' novel remains so tied to its sources and eager to explain its own meaning that it shows precisely the sort of unambiguous simplicity that Shostakovich's music resists.
The spectre of mortality is very much at the core of Everybody’s Fool. As the hard-living Sully digests a grim heart diagnosis, Raymer wrestles with the discovery that his wife Becka, in the months prior to her tumbling down the stairs to her death, was carrying on with another man ... Some complain that Russo errs on the side of overplotting, and personally I wouldn’t have minded if a late-blooming back story involving the mayor and his wife went missing along with that garage-door opener. For Russo’s acolytes, however, too much of a muchness is part of the lure. You hold his books to your heart even when, like North Bath’s more over-indulgent citizens, they are a bit beefier than they really ought to be.
Russo writes old-fashioned novels, the kind with characters and plot development, not asterisks or moody ellipses. And his subjects are old-fashioned people who live in the kind of blue-collar small towns where everyone knows everyone else’s business, but (usually) reserve judgment ... Russo’s compassionate heart is open to the sorrows, and yes, the foolishness of this lonely world, but also the humor, friendship and love that abide.
Russo is one of America’s great humorists. His novels often rely on the absurd and comic to give glimpse into the souls of his characters. Raymer’s grief is real, but his struggle with the garage door opener often seems silly. The honest and realistic reader must ask, however, who among us has not descended into the silly under the erroneous rationalization of self-importance? That question, depending on the answer and the framing of the answer, can harvest hope or despair. It is this conflict between cynicism and optimism that rests at the heart of Russo’s fiction, and animates Everybody’s Fool ... Everybody’s Fool does not equal the emotional might of Nobody’s Fool but it possesses elegance and wisdom worthy of study in the millions of Baths across the world.
Everybody’s Fool is bizarrely lurid and broad, featuring outlandish events like an escaped venomous snake and brutal acts of violence (more or less taken in stride by the old-timers). If this still qualifies as a slice of life, it’s from a pie made by Guy Fieri. Do these elements make for a bad book? Certainly Russo’s skills as a writer have not diminished; the book is filled with lovely passages and smart dialogue that provides thoughtful shading to both major and minor characters. The problem is that it can’t be viewed in a vacuum, and suffers in comparison to both the original and Russo’s overall body of work.
Twenty years on from when I first began reading Russo, a lot of water has gone under the bridge. The world has become increasingly smaller and the tragedies of it more readily accessible, so that a storyteller today might feel the need to emphasize the violence and ugliness of their fictional world to hold a reader's attention. The water in Bath has run cold. While it's cozy, if not cursed, a darkness has fallen on the streets and seeps into Russo's story in a way that wasn't there in 1993. The Rust-Belt town was never a Disneyland by any means, but the stain of violence was simply touched upon, what happened behind closed doors an underlying motive for the psyche of the characters. Today, that stain is unwashable and the violence in-your-face. It can be difficult to read, but read we do because Russo also knows justice and how to deliver it.
Given the profundity of Raymer's crisis and the misfortune that abounds in Bath in the course of a short two days, is it impertinent to report that Everybody's Fool is frequently uproariously, laugh-out-loud funny? Few writers can match Russo's knack for comic sarcasm and wisecracking dialogue, particularly through the voice of Sully. Nor can many top Russo's gift for cascading absurd calamity on his characters alongside naked mirth. In Everybody's Fool, we see a police chief who faints into the open grave at a local judge's funeral, an escaped cobra and a chapter titled 'Rub's Penis.' To say that hilarity ensues alongside the grimmer elements of life in Bath is a gross understatement, and a tribute to Russo's prodigious gifts as a storyteller.
There is real angst and introspection here – not to mention a large dose of male insecurity that the men of North Bath tend to mask with wisecracks and high jinks ... Empire Falls, Russo’s 2001 novel, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and was made into an HBO miniseries. Everybody’s Fool has the same zany potential, the book a repository of a town where anything can still happen – and probably will.
