Somebody's Fool and Community

Yesterday's newsletter that didn't happen

My plan for yesterday’s newsletter was to elaborate on a Facebook post I wrote two weeks ago. I had just finished Richard Russo’s Somebody’s Fool, the third book in his series on the Don (Sully) Sullivan and his son Peter. I’ve been reading pretty much everything Russo writes ever since I read Straight Man (which the series Lucky Hank was based on).

Here’s what I’d written on Facebook:

Set in the midst of the Great Recession, it picks up the characters from Nobody’s Fool and Everybody’s Fool. They cope with the loss of Sully, the central character of the first two books. But while they seem to be repeating previous patterns, they wind up showing real growth.

Reading this book (and the others), I made the contrast to Updike’s Rabbit Trilogy. Where Updike’s characters seem trapped to repeat their character failings (especially the title character), nearly everybody in Somebody’s Fool finds ways of exploring healthy change.

Over the last two weeks, I’ve been thinking about this contrast based on my memories of the Rabbit books. So I took advantage of the Denver Public lLibrary to get my hands on Updike’s series (and learned that there were four, not three Rabbit books but was able to get the first, third, and fourth).

Reading the first few pages of the three books reinforced my general sense. Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom is central character and primary narrator. In fact, he is the center of his world and believes that’s how it’s been since his years as a high school basketball star (where he got the nickname). He’s a sad character who ignores his loved ones and pursues his own desires. The characters in his periphery are somewhat stuck in their relationships due to that self-centeredness.

In the North Bath books (which each occur about twenty years after the Rabbit stories), Sully is a blue collar worker with an eclectic set of relationships. His eighth grade teacher, his contractor boss, his friends, his mistress, other players in town, the local sheriff. In spite of their quirks, he accepts them and enjoys them. He also seems to enjoy life.

I didn’t have the first book in the series (which won the Pulitzer for fiction) in my library, so I picked up a used one. I realized that my knowledge of it was actually based on the 1994 movie starring Paul Newman.

All these wonderful characters show up in the later two books (except that Sully dies toward the end of Everybody’s Fool). It’s also a story of what happens to small town America. North Bath’s spring dried up, which meant that the vibrant part of the community shifts to nearby Schuyler Springs. Russo’s Empire Falls tells a similar story (and was a great HBO series starring Ed Harris).

Where Rabbit desires to run away from his life (and does in the opening of the first book), Sully as well as son Peter in Somebody’s Fool, seem to find the best in their circumstances. In doing so, they bring out the best in all of the other characters in the community and help the town adjust to its new status following annexation into Schuyler Springs.

So while I think my Facebook contrast was correct, really developing it was going to require an in-depth read of five books and a literary analysis well beyond the scope of a thrice weekly SubStack newsletter.

If you’re not reading Richard Russo, you’re missing out.