49 pages • 1 hour read
Richard RussoEverybody's Fool
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Alternate Identities and Fate
In the opening chapter of Richard Russo’s Everybody’s Fool, Raymer ponders his former teacher Beryl Peoples’s “rhetorical triangle,” which develops a complex relationship between subject, audience, and speaker. The side of the triangle that baffles him the most is “speaker,” because Beryl stresses the importance of figuring out the identity of the person who is doing the communicating. Every act of speech, her lesson argues, means first distinguishing the persona behind the words from the human being doing the wordsmithing:
On each of his essays she wrote Who are you? […] There was always, she claimed, an “implied writer” lurking behind the writing itself. Not you, the actual author—not the person you saw when you looked in the mirror—but rather the “you” that you became when you picked up a pen with the intention to communicate. Who is this Douglas Raymer? She liked to ask provocatively (14-15).
Beryl’s triangle implies that Douglas Raymer assumes a different guise depending on who he is speaking to, his attitude toward them, and his communicative intentions. More broadly, the passage is metafictional, as the novel is asking the reader to consider the identity of the Richard Russo behind the omniscient voice that narrates the novel, or the different personas that characters adopt when they explain parts of their stories: Roy, when he contemplates his memory of the kind waitress that stuck up for him; Zack, when he explains how he subdued and then killed Roy; Jerome, whose mental illness makes him the most unreliable of all the novel’s narrators, casting strong doubt on his belief that Raymer has been tormenting him.
This coexistence of myriad potential selves is reflected in the tendency of characters to double or repeat themselves. Rub—the unfortunate, good-natured, and loyal human—is unwillingly paired with Rub, the unfortunate, good-natured, and loyal dog. Alice’s abusive former partner, Kurt, shifts fluidly between different identities, perfectly mimicking the voices and mannerisms of others. Ruth dreams of an alternative life in a “parallel universe” (125). Even Raymer, who has lived a life of civic responsibility and self-effacement, is fractured into the ruthless and potentially sociopathic Dougie.
For much of the novel, Raymer rejects the self-determination implied in the Beryl’s question about the speaker-audience-subject triangle; he does not believe that he has the agency to decide “Who is this Douglas Raymer.” Becka’s sudden death and the inexorable decline of North Bath make Raymer feel at the mercy of an arbitrary and frequently cruel fate, which renders human endeavor ridiculous and futile: “[I]t, not you, is in charge and always will be” (200). Sully, too, has been on the receiving end of Beryl’s teacherly calls for self-improvement. He remembers her asking, “Does it ever trouble you that you haven’t done more with the life God gave you?” (448), but internally decides that this bothers him only “Now and then” (448). Sully rejects the idea that he has the ability not to obey the impulses he deems his innate temperament:
[He knows it is] selfish of him to make sure that his destination at the end of the day was a barstool among men who, like himself, had chosen to be faithful to what they took to be their own natures, when instead they might have been faithful to their families or to convention or even to their own early promise (448).
However, toward the close of the novel, Sully and Raymer re-evaluate these self-centered positions, refocusing on those around them, indicating that they have chosen who they want to be despite preconceptions about fate.
Public and Private Lives
In the small town setting of Russo’s novel, the distinctions between the personal and the public are often far from clear. Everyone knows everyone else’s business. For example, Ruth’s affair with Sully is common knowledge, as are the circumstances of Becka’s death. The novel’s two main characters, Raymer and Sully, deal with this slippage in opposite ways: Raymer has opted into, while Sully has opted out of, public life. As police chief, Raymer carries a significant weight of civic responsibility, while the divorced and sporadically employed Sully tends to shrug off any such ties. However, Russo’s novel suggests that individuals are innately “public” and intrinsically interconnected—that some form of commitment to others is inevitable and necessary.
Sully is the main character of Nobody’s Fool, the first novel in Russo’s trilogy. Sully might be termed “nobody’s fool” because he eschews social bonds that might make him appear or reveal him to be foolish. As the ambiguous title indicates, however, Sully is also a particularly lonely fool belonging to no one. On the other hand, Raymer, the titular “everybody’s fool” of this novel, is a police chief whose life belongs to the whole community. However, the two are not actually so different. While Raymer feels oppressed by his duties, Sully resists but cannot altogether forego his obligations to Rub, and to Ruth and her family. The novel’s revelation is that despite the ornery faces they present to the world, their anomie comes from their growing disillusionment with their relative powerlessness, rather than antisocial aggression. Sully and Raymer are profoundly empathetic and compassionate: Raymer constantly looks out for vulnerable members of the community, such as Alice and Mr. Hynes, while Sully takes both the human and the canine Rubs under his wing.
This push-and-pull between the public and the personal is also reflected in the character arc of Gus, mayor of the struggling North Bath and husband of the mentally ill Alice. Gus entered into marriage and public service to improve the lives of those around him. As his wife’s condition deteriorates and the situation in the town becomes almost surreally dire, with the dead spilling out of their graves and poisonous serpents on the loose, he comes to see his endeavors as hubris: “[H]e’d bitten off more than he could chew, and now he was gagging. This sin had a name: pride. Nothing now remained but what pride goeth before” (296).
While the novel indulges Gus’s fatalism, it ends with Raymer comforting Gus and encouraging him to persevere. Raymer’s pragmatic advice doesn’t shy away from the idea that private individuals can never fully measure up to their public responsibilities: “[I]t was a shame, indeed a crying shame, though probably not a crime, to be unequal to the most important tasks you’re given” (457). However, Raymer stresses that “it’s possible for us to be better people tomorrow than we are today” (458). In other words, even if people are doomed to failure, effort is nonetheless praiseworthy, since no longer trying to “be better people” is giving up on life itself.
The Living and the Dead
The past—and especially the people of the past—inescapably haunt Russo’s novel. Russo presents death as both dauntingly imminent and unfathomably distant. The action takes place over Remembrance Day weekend, a holiday that marks the end of WWI and honors that conflict’s dead. The plot opens with a funeral and the Hilldale Graveyard is one of the main settings. Memories of the deceased—such as Beryl Peoples, Becka, and Ruth’s mother-in-law—cast a long shadow on characters that are still alive, both as reminders of failure and as warnings about the future. Finally, the climax of the novel is the violent death of Roy Purdy and the life-threatening surgery on Sully’s heart. In short, Everybody’s Fool is profoundly concerned with the boundaries between the living and the dead.
Death impacts the decisions characters make in serious, and sometimes self-destructive ways. Ruth continues to be oppressed by her mother-in-law’s memory long after that woman has died; the discomfort Ruth feels in her home leads both to her affair with Sully and to her daydreams about escaping into an alternate reality. Only when she and her husband Zack can focus on the magic of the present, captivated by awe-inspiring lightning strike, can she feel embodied enough to participate in the pleasures of the living. Similarly, Raymer obsessively thinks about his recently dead wife Becka, whose cryptic confession that she was leaving him for someone else preceded her death and left him with an impenetrable mystery. Raymer pleads with her cold, inanimate gravestone, hunts for her lover around town, and forestalls a budding relationship with Charice because Becka’s infidelity makes him feel inferior.
At the same time, the proximity of the dead offers some of the novel’s most mordantly funny episodes. The opening scene of Judge Flatt’s funeral contrasts the imposing nature of death with the indignities of the living. Raymer resents the utter inappropriateness of Reverend Tunic’s sermon to the sardonic man he is eulogizing—nothing about the speech’s solemnity actually represents the man Raymer knew and disliked. To cap off the disjointed experiences, as the town experiences an earthquake, Raymer faints into Judge Flatt’s grave—a gesture of inconsolable grief turned into slapstick comedy. The most bizarre intrusion of humor into the sphere of the dead is the mudslide that unearths the cemetery’s graves, sending them spilling into the town and thus confirming the novel’s opening observation that death and life ultimately amount “to the same thing” (3)—that the graveyard is so full of the dead because the town has been so full of life.
In the absence of any clear spiritual dimension, this conclusion might seem bleak. However, the enduring memory of Beryl Peoples, who continues to posthumously exert a positive influence on the community to which she dedicated her life, demonstrates that the dead are an important guide for the living. As Raymer puts it, “she’d remained in his margins down through the years, like a good teacher will” (476), confirming that human lives can be meaningful despite their brevity.
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