The Nature of Things

Everybody's Fool once again takes us to the small upstate New York town of North Bath just a bit more than a decade after the events of Nobody's Fool . The town is still the hapless poor relation of its neighboring town and chief rival Schuyler Springs and on the surface things seem pretty much as we left them. But, inevitably, time has made a few changes at least in the cast of characters. Sadly, Miss Beryl, the woman who taught eighth grade for many years at the local school and whom we met as Donald (Sully) Sullivan's beloved landlady in the last book, is no longer on the scene. However, even though she may be physically absent, her spirit lingers and as we visit North Bath this time around, the town is getting ready to honor her memory during Memorial Day festivities by renaming the school after her.  Sully is still there and he and Miss Beryl seem to have exchanged roles. For many years, he had been her boarder in her big Victorian house on North Main Street; now it s...

Richard Russo's fictional North Bath is a blue-collar town in upstate New York, a town where luck ran out a hundred years before when the springs that made it a popular spa town dried up. The town has been dying a slow death since then. It seems that nothing good ever happens there. We visit the town in the fall of 1984. Ronald Reagan is president but his "Morning in America" certainly has not dawned in North Bath.  Nevertheless, there is hope on the horizon in the form of a theme park called the Ultimate Escape that may be built near the town, breathing in some much-needed life.  The main booster of this putative theme park is the local banker Clive Peoples, Jr., perhaps the only purely unlikable character in this novel featuring smart-alecky, low-key characters. Clive has a mother, eighty-year-old widow Beryl Peoples, a retired teacher who lives in one of North Bath's ancient houses, "aging clapboard Victorians and sprawling Greek Revivals that would have been ...