Nobody's Fool

whether it was because she already had her answer or because he’d been overtaken finally by exhaustion or because it had occurred to him that he had no idea what he wanted.
    When she returned with her own cup of tea, he was asleep, his headback, mouth open, snoring. It was a thunderous sound, the first time she’d heard it so close, without the ceiling between them. He’d fallen asleep in the act of removing one boot with the toe of the other.
    Miss Beryl located the ashtray she kept for Sully in the end table and put it under his cigarette just as the tall ash toppled. When she removed the cigarette itself from between his stained thumb and forefinger, she noticed that Sully slept with his eyes open, the knowledge of which caused her to smile. Old houses surrendered a great many secrets, and in the twenty-some years she’d listened to Sully living above her, she’d concluded that she knew just about everything there was to know about her tenant. But here was a new thing.
    Outside in the cold hall, the dog’s chain rattled again, and when Miss Beryl opened the door, the Doberman scrambled with great, spastic effort to its feet, circling itself in the process several times, stepping on its own chain, until it finally located its fragile equilibrium. Then it stood looking at her expectantly, as if to suggest the hope that it hadn’t gone to so much trouble for nothing.
    â€œYou might as well come in too,” she told the animal.
    The dog apparently understood, because it loped past her, collapsing again with another massive sigh at the foot of the Queen Anne, its nub of a tail twitching in what—who could know?—just might be contentment.

ALSO BY R ICHARD R USSO

    BRIDGE OF SIGHS
    Louis Charles Lynch (known as Lucy) is sixty years old and has lived in Thomaston, New York, his entire life. Lucy’s oldest friend, once a rival for his wife’s affection, leads a life in Venice far from Thomaston. Lucy writes the story of his town, his family, and his own life, interspersed with that of the native son who left so long ago and never looked back.
    Fiction/Literature
    MOHAWK
    Mohawk, New York, is one of those small towns that lie almost entirely on the wrong side of the tracks. Dallas Younger, a star athlete in high school, now drifts from tavern to poker game, while his ex-wife, Anne, is stuck in a losing battle with her mother over the care of her sick father. Richard Russo explores these lives with profound compassion and flint-hard wit.
    Fiction/Literature
    NOBODY’S FOOL
    Nobody’s Fool
follows the unexpected operation of grace in the life of an unlucky man, Sully, who has been triumphantly doing the wrong thing for fifty years. Divorced and carrying on with another man’s wife, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has a new problem: a son who is in danger of following in his father’s footsteps. With humor and a heart that embraces humanity’s follies, this is storytelling at its most generous.
    Fiction/Literature
    THE RISK POOL
    Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult. His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments.
    Fiction/Literature
    STRAIGHT MAN
    William Henry Devereaux, Jr., is the reluctant chair of the English department at an underfunded college in the Pennsylvania rust belt. In the course of a week, Devereaux will have his nose mangled by an angry colleague, imagine his wife is having an affair with the dean, wonder if an adjunct is trying to seduce him with peach pits, and threaten to execute a goose on local television. At the same time, he must come to terms with the dereliction of his youthful promise and the ominous failure of certain vital body functions. In short,
Straight Man
is classic Russo—side-splitting, true-to-life, and impossible to put down.
    Fiction/Literature
    THAT OLD CAPE MAGIC
    It’s a perfectly lovely wedding weekend on the Cape, but for Griffin, the middle-aged father of the bride, it marks the beginning of his descent into a failed marriage, a confrontation