This is optimism in print.

Russo has become our national priest of masculine despair and redemption. The gruff grace that Russo traffics in might seem sentimental next to the merciless interrogation of John Updike’s Rabbit series or the philosophical musings of Richard Ford’s novels about Frank Bascombe. But Russo understands the appeal, even the necessity, of those absurd affections that exceed all reason and make the travails of human life endurable.

A eulogy for everymen: Updike’s Rabbit and Ford’s Frank Bascombe

Although “Somebody’s Fool” is a novel predicated on death, it’s pitched against hopelessness. And yet it would seem that the spirit has finally drained out of North Bath. After decades of wheezing on a rusty ventilator, this depressed town is being annexed by its far wealthier rival, Schuyler Springs, a place of “latte-drinking homosexuals and one-God-at-most Unitarian churches, a town where morally upright, God-fearing, hardworking people couldn’t afford to live.” Not that morally upright, God-fearing, hardworking people seem particularly prevalent in the soon-to-be-dissolved town North Bath. But like hanging, the annexation has concentrated the minds of old-time North Bath residents.

Still a decade from retirement age, Police Chief Douglas Raymer has been given the dreary job of shutting down the town’s police force, which is proving easier than wrapping up his own career. In his spare time he might finally get around to reading “Great Expectations,” which is more ironic than Raymer knows. Therapy hasn’t helped quell the mocking voice in his head, a residual effect of getting struck by lightning. On the plus side, that voice has made him a better cop.

Romantically, his life feels equally unsettled. Charice, his African American girlfriend — technically, his ex-girlfriend — is the new police chief in Schuyler Springs, where she’s dealing with a toxic mix of racism and brutality. Raymer is determined to be supportive but unintrusive, available but not clingy. It’s a tough assignment. Raymer will protect and serve, even when Charice asks him to look after her troubled brother, who’s determined to tutor Raymer in the finer points of Black experience and White privilege.

Closing the North Bath police force would have required nothing more than some paperwork, except for the discovery of a corpse hanging in an abandoned hotel.

That body of an unidentified man in a derelict building on the edge of a dying town slathers on the gloom pretty thick, but we didn’t make it this far in the “Fool” series to wallow in misery. Although the corpse provides a whiff of mystery, it’s suspended by a very thin thread. Russo has many other things to do in this dilatory story than solve a crime, and it quickly becomes apparent that whoever the hotel victim was, he gave his life only to provide the plot with an excuse to keep Raymer connected to Charice.

Besides, there’s a much more consequential dead man hanging over this novel. Donald Sullivan, whom everybody called Sully, is gone now, but his specter remains so prevalent in these pages that “Somebody’s Fool” is practically a ghost story. “He’s dead and gone,” one character shouts in exasperation. “Does he have to haunt every single conversation we have?”

Sully’s old friends are still stumbling around in a reverie of fond memories and unhealed grief. I half expected them all to wear sport bracelets that ask, “WWSD?” Their recollections and apostrophes are sweet, but they also freight the novel with an enormous burden of exposition. And if you haven’t read the previous two novels, you’re likely to feel as though you’re tagging along to your spouse’s college reunion.

In trilogies, as in life, you had to be there.

The richest storyline involves Sully’s son, Peter, who’s starting to realize that he’s not the man he hoped he’d become, which is to say he’s a man. He may not be the wreck his father was, but he’s wrecked his life in other ways.

Uninspired by teaching at a local college, Peter is determined to fix up Sully’s old house, sell it off for a tidy profit and leave North Bath for good. But that plan is interrupted by the unexpected appearance of one of Peter’s sons, a boy he essentially abandoned years ago after a bitter divorce. Seeing his boy, now a defiant, derelict young man, forces Peter to confront all the accusations he’d laid at the feet of his own irresponsible father. As he struggles to consider what reconciliation might look like, he’s forced to recalibrate the ratio of Sully’s faults and merits.

That’s a complicated accounting, which Russo is in no hurry to complete. Indeed, the plot is such a slow burn that when a car explodes about halfway through, I was surprised enough heat had accumulated to do any damage.

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With fewer high jinks and a more muted comic range than the previous volumes, this is a long novel of chronic rumination and potential reckoning — a story of disappointed, angry children that takes full advantage of the complicated genealogy constructed over the past 30 years. Russo is a genius at the way kids carry the flaws of their parents and then, despite their resentment, end up reenacting those same flaws on their own children. It’s a pattern that expresses itself through soul and body.

When one of Sully’s old friends asks Peter, “Anybody ever tell you you look more like your old man every day?” he replies, “No one needs to. There’s a mirror in my bathroom.”

But if this is a cycle of doom, it’s one that offers plenty of off-ramps for redemption.

Sully never asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and before he died, he left Peter with a list of wounded, fragile friends that he wanted him to help out.

Peter tries, for a time, to weasel his way out of that duty. “He told himself that all the people he’d promised his father he’d look in on would be fine,” Russo writes. “How much more could reasonably be expected of him? The problem was that despite everything he’d inherited from his father, Peter wasn’t Sully and never would be.”

What Peter doesn’t realize early in the novel is that, despite all their superficial differences, he also inherited his father’s compassion. Which is ultimately Russo’s bequest to us, too. The list of folks we need to look after is never finished; if we’re living right, it keeps growing.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.