Nobody's Fool

North Bath is a small, fading village in the Adirondacks of northern New York whose fortunes collapsed over a century ago when its mineral springs dried up and neighboring Schuyler Springs eclipsed it entirely. In the late autumn of 1984, the town clings to two fragile hopes: the planned restoration of the Sans Souci, its once-grand resort hotel, and the proposed construction of a theme park called The Ultimate Escape on boggy land near the interstate. Against this backdrop of communal decline, the novel follows several weeks in the tangled life of Donald "Sully" Sullivan, a 60-year-old divorced handyman whose stubbornness, bad luck, and refusal to examine his own failings have left him nearly destitute but fiercely independent.

Sully rents an upstairs flat from Miss Beryl Peoples, an 80-year-old retired teacher who keeps him as a tenant against the wishes of her son, Clive Jr., president of the North Bath Savings and Loan. Miss Beryl awakens the morning before Thanksgiving with a sense of foreboding, convinced this will be the year God "lowers the boom" on her, perhaps through one of the ancient elm limbs that have been crashing onto houses since a devastating ice storm. She has retained an attorney, Abraham "Wirf" Wirfly, to protect her affairs from Clive Jr., whom she suspects of trying to gain control of her finances.

Sully, whose knee was badly injured in a fall from a ladder the previous year, has been attending community college as a condition of his disability payments. He quits and returns to manual labor, going to Carl Roebuck, his sometime employer and owner of Tip Top Construction. Carl, a charming, reckless 35-year-old who inherited the business from his father, refuses to pay Sully $300 owed from a previous job but offers new work moving concrete blocks. Their combative friendship, built on mutual distrust and grudging affection, is central to the novel. Sully also harbors feelings for Carl's wife, Toby, who has just changed her locks after Carl gave her gonorrhea for the third time.

Sully's other constant companion is Rub Squeers, a devoted but simple laborer who serves as his helper, his sounding board, and the reliable target of his teasing. Their dynamic is affectionate but lopsided: Sully considers Rub his best friend without ever quite treating him as one.

Working alone, Sully overloads his truck and gets it stuck in mud at Carl's construction site. Hitchhiking back to town, he is picked up by his estranged son, Peter, a college professor recently denied tenure, along with Peter's unhappy wife, Charlotte, and their three boys: Will, the anxious eldest; Wacker, the aggressive middle child; and baby Andy. Peter invites Sully to Thanksgiving at the home of Sully's ex-wife, Vera. Sully has been almost entirely absent from Peter's life, rationalizing that Vera and her gentle second husband, Ralph, were better parents than he could ever be.

Thanksgiving proves disastrous. Sully falls asleep in his idling truck outside Vera's house, overcome by pain pills and exhaust fumes, and Peter calls an ambulance thinking his father is dead. Inside, the family dinner falls apart: Vera's elderly father, Robert Halsey, can barely breathe; Peter and Charlotte are clearly in crisis; and the boys' violent squabbling sends the evening into chaos. Will escapes through a bathroom window and hides in Sully's truck. Sully discovers him and takes him for ice cream, listening without judgment as Will describes his fantasy of his parents' divorce. The episode begins an unexpected bond between grandfather and grandson.

Meanwhile, Ruth, Sully's longtime lover and a worker at the local pizza shop, faces her own crisis. Her daughter, Janey, has fled an abusive husband named Roy and arrived in Bath with her small daughter, Tina, a silent child with a wandering eye. Roy, hunting for Janey, shows up on Upper Main Street and shoots up a house he mistakes for Sully's address. The violence accelerates several changes: Sully promises Miss Beryl he will move out by the first of the year, and Ruth ends their relationship.

Sully's life is further shaped by the legacy of his father, Big Jim Sullivan, a violent man who terrorized his family. As a boy, Sully swore never to forgive his father, an oath he has kept his entire life and which Ruth considers the source of his deepest troubles.

By mid-December, Sully juggles overlapping jobs: cooking breakfasts at Hattie's diner, renovating a house on Upper Main with Rub and Peter, and pulling up hardwood floors from his father's decaying house for Carl. Peter, who has returned without Charlotte and is staying at Vera's with Will, proves a surprisingly competent worker, though his detachment irritates his father. Sully's finances grow dire: he has bought a truck on installments and borrowed a snowplow blade, but winter refuses to produce snow.

Everything comes to a head before Christmas. Rub, pushed past his limit by Sully's relentless teasing, quits in tears. Sully follows him up the sidewalk in his truck until Officer Raymer, a young policeman Sully has been antagonizing for weeks, blocks his path and fires a warning shot. Sully punches him, breaking his nose, and turns himself in that night. During his week in jail over Christmas, old Hattie dies in a freak accident, The Ultimate Escape deal collapses when the developers choose Maine, and Clive Jr. disappears as his savings and loan faces investigation for fraud. Peter keeps all of Sully's enterprises running and, on drunken instructions, bets Sully's habitual 1-2-3 trifecta, which finally hits, winning over $3,000.

After his release, Sully learns that Vera has had a breakdown, Peter has become involved with Toby Roebuck, and Carl, devastated, has taken up with Peter's former lover. On New Year's Eve, alone in his father's gutted house, Sully hallucinates Big Jim at the foot of the stairs and challenges him to a fight, only to be saved from stepping through a gap in the missing floor by the bark of Rasputin, Carl's stroke-damaged Doberman, which has attached itself to Sully.

Wirf reveals that Miss Beryl, in an act of loyalty to Sully and defiance of her son, has paid the back taxes on the Bowdon Street property, returning it to Sully's ownership, with an offer of at least $20,000 already in hand from the Sans Souci's new owners. Sully tells Miss Beryl he forgives her, a word that carries enormous weight for a man who has refused to forgive anyone his entire life. He falls asleep in her repaired Queen Anne chair, the damaged Doberman at his feet, and Miss Beryl lets them both stay: two battered creatures who have found, for the moment, something like rest.