Boarded-Up Glocca Morra

By John Skow

TITLE: NOBODY'S FOOL

AUTHOR: RICHARD RUSSO

PUBLISHER: RANDOM HOUSE; 549 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: The author takes a genial, if predictable, view of a decaying Main Street and its farcical inhabitants.

Half the truth about small towns, much sentimentalized now that three-level regional malls with indoor waterfalls have replaced the towns as economic centers, is that they were wonderful, warm places where even the local drunk was part of the patchwork and where attention was paid. That's the genial view taken by novelist Richard Russo in The Risk Pool, Mohawk and his new book Nobody's Fool, three funny, loose-jointed yarns about backwater burgs in upstate New York. Doubtless it is contrary to recall the rest of the truth, which is that small towns were rigidly small-minded. That was the engine that drove American literature for several generations, as exasperated young writers, fed up with Main Street hypocrisy, lit out for Chicago or New York City.

But Gopher Prairie doesn't have many young to suffocate and embitter these days. Russo's characters in the fictional town of North Bath, not far from the Vermont border, are rueful losers who, late in middle age, have known one another since grade school. They weren't all that bright then, and they don't expect much of one another now. Improvisation least of all; after several decades on adjacent bar stools, they can say one another's lines.

Nothing changes in North Bath. This is true not just of the town's continuing decay but also of the author's approach to character, which is that of commedia dell'arte. He assigns an easily recognizable peculiarity to each actor in his masque, who then exhibits his oddity whenever he is in view.

This means that the book's action is comfortingly predictable. Sleazy Clive Jr., the conniving savings and loan president, will try to get his 80-year-old mother Miss Beryl to sign over her house to him, but since Miss Beryl's role is to be the Smartest Person in Town, she won't. the novel's hero, Sully, a 60-year-old handyman with a bad knee, will enact Good Guy Without a Grain of Sense. Sully's sidekick Rub plays Loyal Shortie with the Brain of a Beagle. The lawyer Wirf, representing Sully in a workmen's comp case, will remain Drunk & Useless but a Pal.

This is not realistic fiction; it's Glocca Morra with a boarded-up main street. Or maybe Yoknapatawpha lite. At its thinnest it seems more jokey than funny. Occasionally, it threatens to become patronizing. Most of the time it works, however, not so much because the author keeps things stirred up but because he persuades the reader to share his great, openhearted fondness for his ridiculous characters. A compact is signed, Russo saying something like, "O.K., yeah, Sully's being a bit of a jerk, but watch what he's going to do now . . ." Or, "Did you meet Vera the Awful Ex-Wife? No? Well, here she comes . . ."

Because they feature nearly the same geographic backwater, and the same sense of being in a region that has fallen out of time, Russo's comedies will be compared to William Kennedy's Albany series, Ironweed, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game and the rest. For now, Kennedy's writing is darker and grimmer, ^ and the resemblance is distant. Kennedy shows the skull beneath the skin; Russo gives us societal desiccation as farce.