Nobody’s Fool was published by Random House in 1993 and adapted into a 1994 film starring Paul Newman in one of his finest late performances. The novel is set in North Bath — a fictional small town in upstate New York (based on Gloversville and similar declining mill towns) — and follows Donald “Sully” Sullivan through the week before Thanksgiving.
Sully is sixty, bad-kneed, living in a rented flat above a diner, doing construction work off the books, estranged from his son (whom he abandoned decades ago), carrying on a half-hearted affair with his best friend’s wife, feuding with his landlady, and gambling on football. He has failed at everything the world considers important — and yet he is the most vital person in the novel, possessed of a stubbornness, humor, and refusal to be defeated that make him the center of gravity around which the town’s other characters orbit.
Russo’s method is Dickensian: the town is populated with dozens of characters — Sully’s landlady Miss Beryl (intelligent, aging, trapped), his best friend Rub (stupid, loyal, helpless), his son Peter (angry, failed, circling back to the town he despised), and Carl the contractor (Sully’s sometime employer and full-time antagonist) — each drawn with such specificity that the novel creates a complete social world.
The deeper subject is American decline: North Bath is dying (the factories closed, the young people left, the buildings decay), and Sully’s refusal to take life seriously is both the cause of his personal failures and a form of resistance against a world that offers nothing worth taking seriously.
Collecting Nobody’s Fool
First edition (Random House, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $25–$60
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $5–$12