SOURCE: Caldwell, Gail. “The Last Resort.” Boston Globe (27 June 1993): 94, 96.

In the following review of Nobody's Fool, Caldwell praises Russo's narrative skill and literary vision but finds the novel excessively lengthy and repetitious.

With his infinite winters and unreflective townfolk, Richard Russo is a master craftsman at broken-pipe realism. He has an anachronistic fondness for sprawling, ordinary life, and his characters are etched large by this grainy intimacy—by the close-focus detail of work endured, love lost, another day gone the way of cruel oblivion. All three of his novels are set in half-defeated hamlets in upstate New York, where foreclosure signs on the main drag compete with old cafes and run-down Victorians. The blue-collar heartache at the center of Russo's fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving; this is a writer whose affection for his characters dominates his every page. By the...