[In the following excerpt, Montrose praises Russo's structure and characterization in Mohawk, but faults the novel for elements of melodrama and excessive length.]

Small-town USA (North-eastern variety) is the milieu for each of these first novels. Richard Russo's Mohawk is a declining leather town in upstate New York, Cathie Pelletier's Mattagash a lumber town whose rusticity and isolation are exceptional even by the standards of backwoods Maine. The similarities do not end there. Both novels are preoccupied with ties of blood and emotion. They share, too, a structure which intersperses the central plot with scenes from their characters' personal histories.

Set in 1967, the opening section of Mohawk revolves around the mysterious bond between two antithetical old men: upright Mather Grouse, a retired leather-cutter in precarious health, and Rory Gaffney, a detested one-time workmate who has long exerted a baneful influence on his life. Gaffney is the father of the “town moron”, Wild Bill, fifteen years earlier a normal teenager (with a crush on Mather's daughter, Anne) until “damaged” in an unexplained “accident”. The clarification of these interconnected enigmas proceeds slowly, impeded as it is by the regular introduction of fresh characters—notably Mrs Grouse and Anne's son, Randall—and the piecemeal exploration of relationships past and present: between Mather and Anne; between Anne and her ex-husband, Dallas; between Anne and her cousin's wheelchair-bound husband, Dan, whom she adored even before she married; between Dallas and his brother's widow. …

This peripheral abundance is all to the good, however, since the enigmas jointly prove something of a damp squib when unfolded early in the second part of the novel (the first having ended with Mather's funeral). The action has jumped five years; the focus switches to Randall, now a college dropout and dodger of the Vietnam draft. Circumstances equip him to exact unbloody vengeance against Rory on his grandfather's behalf; but at the climax of the novel—enacted, melodramatically, during a thunderstorm—the scheme goes haywire in a fashion that leads to three corpses and Randall's wrongful arrest for murder. Things end sunnily, however. Randall avoids both gaol and those sent to claim him for Uncle Sam, while Anne also escapes, severing the twin strings that bind her to Mohawk—love for Dan and filial duty—and lighting out for a new start in distant Phoenix.

Throughout its first section especially, Mohawk is an accomplished piece of fictional architecture, while the characterization is rarely less than competent (it is striking only in the case of Mrs Grouse, a domestic tyrant inexplicably determined to eradicate earthworms from her lawn). The novel's situations, though, often have a touch, occasionally more than a touch, of soap opera about them: strangely, considering Russo's status as a Granta-published dirty realist. But then the incisive prose associated with the genre is also absent. So, too, is the concision: at 406 pages, Mohawk's mainstream realism is decidedly overblown.