The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool. We hope that they will provide you with different ways of looking at--and talking about--a novel whose size, opulence of character and description, broad social canvas, and sheer narrative zest suggest the books of Dickens, John Irving, and Anne Tyler. Amid the whip-crack repartee and wildly proliferating subplots, readers will also discover a serious exploration of the sometimes nourishing, sometimes strangling ties between fathers and sons; a bittersweet homage to America's obsolescing small towns, and a ruefully wise take on what earlier writers called predestination and grace and what Russo's characters experience as plain dumb luck.