Nobody's Fool by Richard Russo

Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors. Nobody's Fool is a similar view of small town America as Empire Falls with quirky characters. Sully has never ventured far from the town he has lived in for decades and currently resides as a lodger in the home of his elementary school teacher.

From the cover:

Sully has been doing the wrong thing triumphantly for fifty years. Divorced from his own wife and carrying on halfheatrtedly with another man's, saddled with a bum knee and friends who make enemies redundant, Sully now has one new problem to cope with - a long-estranged son who is in imminent danger of following in his father's footsteps.

 

Chances Are by Richard Russo

Richard Russo is one of my favorite authors and I was fortunate to come across Chances Are - a signed first edition, at a book sale. With the library currently closed because of the Coronavirus pandemic I'm going through the shelf of unread books I have acquired.

The story is told between three college friends: Teddy, Lincoln and Mickey who, now in their sixties, return to the summer home of Lincoln's mother in Martha's Vinyard. They each reminisce about their time on Memorial Day weekend in 1971 before Mickey was scheduled to be drafted during the Vietnam War. Along with the three friends, Jacy, who each of the boys was in love with stayed for a while but left the seaside home and was never seen again. Each of the men has different memories of their week-end and Lincoln, while reconnecting with the older men, is also reviewing this as a last farewell to the house his mother loved before it is sold.

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo

Richard Russo is one of my favorite writers (I loved Empire Falls) and That Old Cape Magic didn't disappoint and another one for my favorite books of 2017 list.

From the cover:
Griffin has been tooling around for nearly a year with his father's ashes in the trunk, but his mother is very much alive and not shy about calling on his cell phone. She does so as he drives down to Cape Cod, where he and his wife, Joy, will celebrate the marriage of their daughter Laura's best friend. For Griffin this is akin to driving into the past, since he took his childhood summer vacations here, his parents' respite from the hated Midwest. . . By the end of a perfectly lovely week-end. the past has so thoroughly swamped the present that the future suddenly hangs in the balance. And when, a year later, a far more important wedding takes place, Griffin's chauffeuring two urns of ashes as he contends once more with his wife and her large unruly family.

Keeping Mum

Adapted from Pulitzer Prize winner, Richard Russo's, short story The Trunk, Keeping Mum is a dark comedy set in the fictional English village, Little Wallop, with Rowan Atkinson and Kristin Scott Thomas staring as a vicar and his wife, and Maggie Smith as the housekeeper with a past.

From the DVD:
Rowan Atkinson stars as an absent-minded vicar of a rural parish who is so distracted by the pressures of his job that he fails to notice his wife's dalliance with her brash golf instructor, his daughter's parade of new boyfriends, and his young son's regular trounding by the school bullies. Enter their charming new housekeeper, Grace, a sweet old lady with her own distinctive definition of cleaning house and a very unusual way of solving problems.




While the movie was marvelous, I also enjoyed, in the features section, a glimpse into the making of the movie. It was partly filmed (church and vicarage) in St-Michael-Penkevil, near Truro. (I love this part of England and visited the church many years ago when I lived in Cornwall.) The golf club scenes were filmed on the Isle of Man, an island between Ireland and England. The railway scenes were filmed in Yorkshire.