SOURCE: Mosher, Howard Frank. “The Strife of Bath.” Washington Post Book World 23, no. 23 (6 June 1993): 8.

In the following review, Mosher praises Russo's deft portrayal of small-town American life in Nobody's Fool, arguing that the novel contains “some of the most darkly yet genuinely funny scenes I've encountered in any recent fiction.”

“This town will never change,” the proprietor of Hattie's Diner bleakly observes of the decayed old Adirondack resort village of Bath, toward the end of Richard Russo's superb new novel [Nobody's Fool]. On the surface, at least, this assessment seems irrefutable. After all, the mineral springs from which Bath originally took its name ran dry back in 1818; and the village has been tending toward obscurity ever since. Even the lovely old wineglass elms along Upper Main Street in front of Mrs. Beryl People's house are slowly dying, their blackening limbs a menace to the homes they once shaded...