Understanding Richard Russo

Chapter 3: The Risk Pool

chapter 3 The Risk Pool Richard Russo’s second novel, The Risk Pool (1988), returns to the fictional town of Mohawk, New York, the setting of his first novel, a generation before the story told in Mohawk. The Risk Pool begins around the time of World War II and extends into the early 1980s. A number of characters and many settings featured in Mohawk reappear in this second novel, including the Mohawk Grill, its proprietor Harry Saunders, Greenie’s Tavern, Our Lady of Sorrows Catholic Church, Untemeyer the bookie, Wild Bill Gaffney, and several other place, street, and family names. More important than the repeated physical and human landscapes, though, several themes first addressed in Mohawk are revisited in The Risk Pool and begin to establish patterns in Russo’s fiction that will extend throughout much of his published work. The Risk Pool reprises the issue of environmental contamination that surfaced in Mohawk, specifically the tanneries’ culpability in poisoning the water and the people of Mohawk. It also addresses the financial despair that accompanies life within a marginal economy that barely sustains itself, let alone offers future opportunities. But the two most significant themes that Russo tackles in The Risk Pool are dysfunctional and unstable families, especially their effects on children who find themselves in unpredictable situations , and the ongoing issues of socioeconomic inequality, specifically how the have-nots find ways to live in the same world as the haves. Overall, critics received The Risk Pool with admiration, noting, in several cases, the improvement in Russo’s narrative craftsmanship from that of his previous novel. Reviewers such as Michiko Kakutani, who praised Mohawk in the pages of the New York Times, admitted that The Risk Pool clearly outstrips its predecessor in narrative grace: “[Russo’s] previous novel’s tendency to veer precipitately into melodrama has been chastened here (the violent 30 Understanding richard rUsso events that do occur simply seem a part of contemporary life’s uncertainty), and its twisting plot, so reliant on portentously withheld secrets, has been replaced by a straightforward and newly authoritative narrative.”1 The New York Times Book Review echoed this opinion that Russo’s writing had matured , noting, “Even more than in ‘Mohawk,’ with its busier plot and leaner texture, Mr. Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings and especially smells of a town in a tailspin.”2 The Library Journal added its own praise for The Risk Pool, commenting that the novel “is filled with wonderfully drawn characters and hilarious adventures but the subtext is one of sadness and near desperation.”3 Almost without exception, reviewers complimented Russo’s talent for portraying the rhythms and details of smalltown life and painting a tragicomic portrait of the lives of ordinary people in a dead-end town. The Risk Pool opens with an epigraph borrowed from the opening paragraph of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (1945), which suggests Russo’s deliberate effort to portray his down-and-out characters on their own terms, without judgment and certainly without condemnation. The epigraph reads, “Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, ‘whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,’ by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, ‘Saints, and angels and martyrs and holy men,’ and he would have meant the same thing.” The epigraph refers to the residents and workers of the area in Monterey, California, where the fish canneries operated, but in Russo’s vision it could apply to the inhabitants of any working-class community. Russo has acknowledged his admiration for Steinbeck and particularly for Cannery Row for its masterful omniscient narration , and this passage suggests too the power of the omniscient narrator to dictate readers’ responses to the scene played out in front of them. The Risk Pool is dedicated to Jim Russo, the author’s father, who suffered from cancer during much of the time the novel was being written and died before it was completed. Richard Russo has commented in interviews that The Risk Pool is an especially personal novel for him, one in which he tried to work out many of the complex emotions he felt toward his father, and many parallels exist between Sam Hall and Jimmy Russo. Like Sam Hall, Jimmy Russo served in World War II, landing on Utah Beach on D-day and fighting from the French shore all the way to Germany. But after winning a Bronze Star and returning to Gloversville, he could...