He started up the chainsaw, severed the limb, and of course the limb falls, leaving him sitting on that nub. Someone was supposed to bring over a ladder or something like that, and whoever it was didn’t show up.Īnd the guy, frustrated, tied a rope to his belt and tied the other end to his chainsaw and managed to climb up and sit on the limb he was going to prune, and pulled the chainsaw and sat with his back against the trunk of the tree. Richard Russo: It came as a result of a couple of true stories that were told to me. One was a story of a guy whose wife had been bugging him to prune a limb from a tree on their property. Lisa Katzenberger: How long did you think about writing a sequel? How did you know you were ready to revisit these characters and continue their lives?

High School Auditorium on Saturday May 14 at 2 p.m. I spoke with him about how the tools of time and place framed Everybody’s Fool, and how he knew he was ready to revisit these characters. Russo is in the Chicago suburbs this week and will appear at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville on Friday, May 13 at 7 p.m. After visiting every nook and cranny of North Bath and Schuyler Springs, Russo explores the heart, humility, pain, love, and friendship it has to offer. While the original novel focused on the grumpy, gambling, arthritic Sully, the second book follows Douglas Raymer, the newly-minted Chief of Police. More than two decades since his breakout hit Nobody’s Fool, Pulitzer-prize winning author Richard Russo has returned to the same set of characters in the run-down mill town of North Bath in his brilliant follow-up, Everybody’s Fool.

Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo