Everybody's Fool by Richard Russo — Review

Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool is the 2016 sequel to Nobody’s Fool, returning readers to the worn, funny, wounded world of North Bath, New York. If the first novel belonged above all to Donald “Sully” Sullivan, this follow-up opens the frame and lets the whole town breathe. The result is a novel that feels both more sprawling and, in some ways, even more intimate.

“You’re a fool,” Jerome tells Raymer. “And so am I. And everybody we know is a fool, man. Just look around. Who among us isn’t one, most of the time?”

That idea lies at the center of the book. Russo isn’t using “fool” as a cheap insult. He means something larger, sadder, and more affectionate: that human beings are forever misunderstanding themselves, acting against their own interests, fumbling love, resisting change, and then somehow carrying on anyway. Everybody’s Fool is full of mistakes, blind spots, and embarrassments, but it is also full of grace.

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If you read Nobody’s Fool first—as you absolutely should—the return to North Bath is especially rewarding. Roughly a decade has passed, and time has altered the emotional landscape. Some people have died, some relationships have hardened, some dreams have quietly collapsed, and some characters have drifted into positions they may not be equipped to hold. Russo understands one of the great pleasures of sequel fiction: not simply revisiting beloved people, but seeing what time has done to them.

Sully remains enormously important here, but the novel’s true center of gravity often shifts to Police Chief Douglas Raymer, one of Russo’s most unexpectedly affecting creations. Grieving, distracted, haunted, and perpetually off-balance, Raymer is a man whose inner life seems to be unraveling in public. He could have been played for easy comedy, but Russo gives him something better: dignity inside confusion. His sections are often the funniest in the book, but also the most quietly painful.

The supporting cast is equally vivid. Gus, now mayor, helps anchor the town’s civic absurdity, while old loyalties, grudges, romances, and delusions continue to collide in classic Russo fashion. One of the novel’s great strengths is that even minor characters feel as if they exist beyond the page. North Bath isn’t just a setting; it is a fully inhabited social ecosystem, where history clings to every conversation.

Everybody’s Fool also leans a little more openly into the bizarre than its predecessor. A terrible smell hangs over the town. There are cemetery disturbances that feel almost supernatural. A thunderstorm seems charged with spiritual significance. An escaped venomous snake slips through the story like a joke that might suddenly turn deadly. Crime and chaos increase, yet Russo never loses control of the tone. The strange elements don’t break the realism; instead, they heighten the sense that ordinary life is already weird, unstable, and faintly miraculous.

What makes the novel work so well is balance. Russo moves between comedy and sorrow with remarkable ease. He can make a scene feel ridiculous on one page and deeply moving on the next without seeming manipulative. That tonal flexibility is one of his signature gifts as a novelist, and it is on full display here. North Bath is shabby, hilarious, bruised, lonely, and lovable all at once.

Love, in this book, is never sentimental. Russo treats it as a flawed but necessary force—less a fairy-tale solution than a form of imperfect medicine. People wound each other, fail each other, and misunderstand what they most need, yet connection still matters. Closely tied to this is the novel’s larger concern with healing: not neat closure, but the difficult decision to keep living after loss. Russo doesn’t offer easy redemption. He offers something better and truer—the possibility of endurance.

Spoiler-Free Verdict: This is a warm, sharply observed, often very funny novel about grief, foolishness, second chances, and the strange dignity of ordinary lives. Readers who loved Nobody’s Fool will find a sequel that honors the first book while expanding its emotional range.

Compared with the first novel, Everybody’s Fool may feel looser and more eccentric, but that looseness is part of its charm. It trusts character over plot mechanics and emotional accumulation over dramatic tricks. The pleasure of reading it comes not only from what happens, but from spending time in Russo’s company—his intelligence, his compassion, and his unshowy prose style, which can seem effortless even when it is doing very precise work.

For readers who like their fiction deeply humane, this is an easy book to recommend. It is literary without being cold, humorous without being frivolous, and emotionally serious without becoming heavy-handed. Russo writes about ordinary people with extraordinary patience, and that patience becomes its own form of wisdom.

Final thoughts: Everybody’s Fool is not just a return to familiar territory; it is a deepening of it. The novel broadens the world of North Bath, enriches its characters, and sharpens its themes of mortality, foolishness, resilience, and reluctant hope. If Nobody’s Fool introduced one of modern fiction’s great small-town worlds, this sequel proves that Russo still knows exactly how to make that world feel alive.

And yes—the title turns out to be both funny and profound. In Russo’s hands, being a fool is not merely a weakness. It is part of being human. The real triumph of the novel is that by the end, those flaws feel less like reasons for judgment than reasons for compassion.