Richard Russo Returns To North Bath, NY, In 'Everybody's Fool'

Richard Russo Returns To North Bath, NY, In 'Everybody's Fool'

Yui Hatano jav




Everybody's Fool

by Richard Russo


Hardcover, 477 pagespurchase







The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Empire Falls says his characters are inspired by his parents' working-class World War II generation. Russo's new novel is set in a small town in upstate New York.


TERRY GROSS, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. My guest, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo, is best-known for his books "Empire Falls," which was adapted into an HBO series starring Paul Newman, and "Nobody's Fool," which was adapted into a film starring Paul Newman and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

We have lost both those great actors, but the characters they portrayed in "Nobody's Fool" have been revived in Russo's new novel, "Everybody's Fool." It's set in the late-90s, 10 years after "Nobody's Fool," in the same fictional economically depressed working-class town in upstate New York.

Reviewing the novel in the New York Times, Janet Maslin described this fictional setting as, quote, "a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else, and half the citizens are half-crazy. It's a great place for a reader to visit and it seems to be Mr. Russo's spiritual home," unquote.

The character Sully, who is played by Newman, was described by Russo as a case-study underachiever who is now in his early 70s and finds out he has a heart problem. Doug Raymer, who was a cop portrayed by Philip Seymour Hoffman in "Nobody's Fool," is now the police chief, a promotion that has resulted in boredom, frustration, and a few extra pounds from sitting behind a desk.

Richard Russo, welcome back to FRESH AIR. Let's start with a reading from the first paragraph of your book. And you're welcome to set it up for us or to just dive in - whatever you prefer.

RICHARD RUSSO: (Reading) Hilldale Cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle.

GROSS: Wait, I'm going to stop you right there.

RUSSO: Yeah.

GROSS: I love that you're starting with the cemetery. So just take it again.

RUSSO: OK.

GROSS: I just want to point that out (laughter).

RUSSO: OK, OK. (Reading) Hilldale Cemetery in North Bath was cleaved right down the middle, its Hill and Dale sections divided by a two-lane macadam road, originally a colonial cart path. Death was not a thing unknown to the town's first hearty residents, but they seemed to have badly misjudged how much of it there'd be, how much ground would be needed to accommodate those lost to harsh winters, violent encounters with savages and all manner of illness. Or was it life, their own fecundity, that they'd miscalculated? Ironically, it amounted to the same thing. The plot of land set aside on the outskirts of town became crowded, then overcrowded, then chock-full, and finally the dead broke containment, spilling across the now-paved road onto the barren flats and reaching as far as the new highway spur that led to the interstate. Where they'd head next was anybody's guess.

GROSS: Richard Russo, thank you for reading that. That's from the opening of Richard Russo's new book "Everybody's Fool." The cemetery is kind of a focal point in the book. I'm always interested in what cemeteries mean to people and whether they want to be buried in one, whether they visit relatives in one, whether they feel particularly connected to the people who they visit in cemeteries when they are in the cemetery, you know, if it helps connect them to the past and to their loved one. And since you spent a lot of time in the cemetery in the novel...

RUSSO: Yeah.

GROSS: ...I'd love to hear what your relationship to cemeteries is and if your parents are in cemeteries, if you visit them a lot there?

RUSSO: Actually, despite the amount of time I spent in Hilldale in this novel, I spend almost no time in cemeteries myself. I've tried, on occasion, to summon whatever it is that draws other people that I know and love to cemeteries. In the past, when I've gone to visit the gravesite of people that I dearly loved in life - my grandfather is buried in the public cemetery in Gloversville, N.Y. My grandmother, right next to him. They were extraordinarily important people in my life.
Jav Teacher
When I was growing up, my grandfather bought a house, you know, not because he wanted to own a house - he had never even thought of that before - but because my mother and I were going to need a place to live. And he bought that house. And my mother went off to work every day and I spent time with my grandmother and grandfather. They were wonderful people that I think about a lot and have written about a lot. But when I've gone to visit their gravesite and I stand in front of the stone that has their names on it, I just feel like an idiot standing there.

GROSS: Why do you feel like an idiot?

RUSSO: Yeah, I do. I mean, and I say, why am I here because I feel much closer to them writing a story about them that reminds me of them. And in writing about them I don't feel that way. I feel like I'm bringing the best parts of them back to life, the parts that I love the most.

My mother's ashes are scattered, actually, in Menemsha Harbor at Martha's Vineyard. My father's ashes - and I'm assuming that they're his ashes because he died at the Albany VA, which is a huge (laughter) bureaucracy, and his ashes were supposed to arrive at some point. And finally, months after that I inquired, you know, saying, where are my father's ashes? - And like two days later, ashes arrived. And (laughter) - but it made me suspicious that they were six months late but then two days later, after my inquiry, they arrived.

I'm sure I have somebody's ashes that are buried in a cemetery in Johnstown, N.Y. And I have visited that site, as well. And whether it's visiting Menemsha Harbor, where my mother's ashes are scattered, or underneath the flagpole in the veteran's cemetery in Gloversville-Johnstown visiting my father's grave, I just don't feel like he's there. And if he's not there then of course I am an idiot. I'm a fool.

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Richard Russo. He has a new novel called "Everybody's Fool." That's a sequel to his novel "Nobody's Fool," which starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Newman.

So in "Everybody's Fool," you return to characters from "Nobody's Fool." Paul Newman starred as the character of Sully, the main character in the movie adaptation of "Nobody's Fool." Philip Seymour Hoffman was the police chief, Doug Raymer - well, he was then police officer. But in the new novel, he's the police chief.

RUSSO: Right.

GROSS: And Paul Newman and Philip Seymour Hoffman are both gone now both dead. And I'm wondering how that affected your ideas about your own creations, about those characters. For people who've seen that movie, you know, Newman and Hoffman kind of define those characters.

You wrote those characters without knowing they'd ever be cast in those roles. But still, you must have been affected in some way by seeing them embody the characters you created. So...

RUSSO: Of course.

GROSS: I'm just interested in what it's like to revive those characters after the actors who portrayed them are gone.

RUSSO: Well, it's both an exhilarating and a very melancholy experience, as you might imagine. I made three movies with Paul Newman. There was "Nobody's Fool," of course and then he played Max - Max Roby in the HBO miniseries of "Empire Falls" and we did a detective movie together called "Twilight" as well.

So, you know, Paul and I weren't intimate friends or anything like that, but I had a great deal of affection for him. I'd like to think that he was fond of me, too. He would always call when a new book came out.

And he'd say hotshot - and I...

(LAUGHTER)

RUSSO: I'd know it was Paul. He'd always say that by way of hello - hotshot, good book. And so there was a personal relationship there. And, you know, they say about actors - about actors owning a role, and I think there's a lot of truth to that.
Jav Gangbang
I think Newman owned that - owned that role. And when I heard him - because he didn't physically look like the man that I had described in "Nobody's Fool" - but when I saw the movie, I heard him say my lines and realized that he had found things in that character that I didn't know were there, which means, of course, that I now share proprietorship or ownership of that character with Paul Newman.

And he would later, of course, do the same thing with Max Roby. So writing a sequel in "Everybody's Fool," there are now almost three owners to Sully because there's my father, who the character was based on and there was the character that I created thinking about my man and then there's - and there's Paul Newman. So now I'm kind of down to a third ownership of this character.