One small way I’ve been dealing with the inflation crunch is by scooping up a larger percentage of my books from yard sales. This is how a well-worn copy of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool ended up in my possession; it was strongly recommended to me by a neighbor-turned-vendor, perhaps in part because the terrible film version was mostly shot in our town. (The house in which Paul Newman’s character was raised by his abusive father is just around the corner.)
I sped though the book in a couple of days, despite some issues I had with its slippery tone—it veers pretty wildly between near-slapstick comedy and Dickensian brutalism. (I cried at the end, so it’s probably safe to say it ultimately tilts toward the latter.) It’s nowhere near a Hall of Famer, but this passage will stick in my mind for a long time; rarely have I seen the penchant for self-destruction more elegantly elucidated. It follows the flawed logic of the book’s protagonist, an aging construction worker who is debating whether or not to punch a policeman in the face.
I’m about to fuck up, he thought clearly, and his next thought was, but I don’t have to. This was followed closely by a third thought, the last of the familiar sequence, which was, but I’m going to anyway. And, as always, this third thought was oddly liberating, though Sully knew from experience that the sensation, however pleasurable, would be short-lived. He was about to harm himself. There could be no doubt of this. But at such moments of liberation, the clear knowledge that he was about to do himself in coexisted with the exhilarating, if entirely false, sense that he was about to reshape, through the force of his own will, his reality.
I bought this gem from the same yard sale, though mostly for ironic purposes. I’m a sucker for any work of literature that mentions the Houston Oilers.
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