Everybody's Fool

For his North Bath novels, Richard Russo has drawn on his own life. As he recounts in his memoir Elsewhere (2012), Russo was born in the upstate New York town of Gloversville. Gloversville was once one a center of the glove-making industry in the United States, but fell into economic decline during the deindustrialization of the 1950s to the 1980s. The town’s economic difficulties led to a fall in the population and a rise in the median age; meanwhile, though the natural beauty of the Adirondacks and the area’s proximity to New York City have led to a certain degree of localized recovery, resulting gentrification has often priced local working-class residents out of the housing market. Gloversville has inspired the small-town settings of most of Russo’s novels, including the North Bath Trilogy.

Russo was raised by a single mother who had mental illness. His father, who provided the inspiration for the character of Sully in the North Bath novels, was a manual laborer with a penchant for drinking and gambling. Russo’s father was scarcely around during the author’s childhood, but the two grew closer as he grew up. Like Sully’s son, Peter, Russo left his hometown to study literature and become a college professor.

Raymer’s dual existence as Doug and Dougie is in some ways based on Russo’s own experiences working in construction with his father in Gloversville during his summer vacations from the University of Arizona. In a radio interview, he described feeling divided in two: “a result of doing that every summer, I think I bifurcated in some way.” Torn between the small-town life of his father and his academic pursuits, “the Richard Russo who grew up and became novelist is one person. But I’ve always had the distinct feeling that there was a ghost version of myself still living back in that place” (“Richard Russo’s Small-Town America.” NPR, 1 Oct. 2007).