[In the following review, Wolitzer compliments Russo's “remarkable fix on blue-collar life in small-town America” in The Risk Pool but criticizes the novel for underdeveloped female characters.]

As he clearly demonstrated in Mohawk, his fine first novel, Richard Russo has a remarkable fix on blue-collar life in small-town America. His second novel also takes place in fictive Mohawk, in upstate New York, and has some of the same peripheral characters. Once again, Russo brilliantly evokes the economic and emotional depression of a failing town, a place where even the weather is debilitating and the inhabitants seem to struggle merely to stay in place. Although The Risk Pool is not as intricately plotted as Mohawk, it is a far more ambitious work, with a Dickensian sprawl and charm.

The narrative is broken into four sections, named for the “seasons” of the year in Mohawk: “Fourth of July,” “Mohawk Fair,” “Eat the Bird” and “Winter.” The narrator is Ned Hall, who reviews the adventure of his childhood and adolescence from the perspective of his 35th year and the brink of fatherhood. But first he looks backward to a time before his own birth, just after the end of World War II, and reconstructs the events of his father's return home after three years of service overseas. Stunned by the miracle of his survival, Sam Hall quickly impregnates his wife, Jenny, and sets out to celebrate not simply his country's victory but life itself. It's not surprising that the celebration, an extended orgy of drinking, gambling and whoring, causes a serious rift between the Halls.

Ned tells us, with considerable irony, that his father's first view of him “must have been a tender moment.” In truth, Sam plays stud poker throughout his wife's labor and has to be forced at gunpoint by his father-in-law to greet his newborn son. And even then he parries for control: “I'll just have a peek at this last card,” my father said. “Then we'll go.”

Six months later, Jenny's father (and only champion) is dead, and she has filed for a divorce. But Sam, who candidly admits that he doesn't love her, refuses to grant her one. For good measure, he beats up F. William Peterson, the lawyer who dares to represent her in the matter. Sam's behavior on most occasions is just as outrageously perverse. He virtually abandons his son for the first six years of the boy's life and then matter-of-factly reappears and asserts his parental claim. That event marks the end of Ned's innocence and the beginning of the experiences that will shape his maturity.

To Sam Hall, lying, gambling and cheating are viable alternatives to responsible citizenry. He has no use for conventional behavior and lives by his own reckless rules, a system that keeps him at the bottom of the car insurance risk pool (hence the title of the book). While Ned is treated with rough affection by Sam, he observes with fascinated horror his father's sadistic badgering of Drew Littler, the teenage son of Sam's girlfriend, Eileen, and his offhand treatment of Eileen herself.

Cuffing Ned lightly on the head, Sam repeatedly asks the boy “So?” and “Well?,” questions that should be rhetorical but aren't. Sam insists on answers and explanations, although he provides very few of them himself. Yet it is Russo's substantial triumph that Sam Hall emerges as a thoroughly whole and memorable character, one who strongly engages his son's and the reader's sympathies and affection.

Jenny Hall, on the other hand, is not nearly so well-defined or complex. At the beginning of the novel, she seems gutsy if ineffectual—shooting at Sam's car in an attempt to keep him away, working at the telephone company and longing after distant places “where they capitalized the word Summer.” Then she becomes more fragile and defenseless, a woman who arouses the saviour complex in her priest and her lawyer, if not in her husband. As the novel progresses, she retreats further and further into herself, and out of our range of attention, until finally she becomes truly catatonic. While the various stresses of Jenny's life might explain such extreme withdrawal, it seems less an inevitability than an authorial device to get her out of the picture.

In the process of his coming of age, Ned shuttled back and forth between his father and his mother (who has been taken up permanently by the gallant and indefatigable F. William Peterson). The dust-jacket copy describes an “emotional tug of war” between Ned's parents for their son's loyalty, but there is really no contest. One of Sam's cronies consistently refers to Ned as “Sam's Kid,” and that's precisely who he is.

The story belongs to Ned and his father; it concentrates on the boy's efforts to understand Sam, and failing that, to earn and keep his love. Jenny's sporadic appearances only serve as a distraction from that central, riveting theme. Despite the seeming drama of her nervous breakdown and ultimate recovery, she remains a vague and shadowy figure. In fact, none of the female characters are as vividly realized as the men—except for Ned's grown-up love, Leigh, who appears only briefly toward the end of the book.

That disparity may be intentional; Mohawk, with its closed-down tanneries and leather mills, its saloons and poolrooms where the men gather to drink and banter and wait out their idle days, is a man's grim world—the world that Ned either must accept or reject. The young boy, bedazzled by his induction into male society, might have only a fuzzy, romantic vision of the women around him. But I think that the grown Ned probably would view them, retrospectively, in fuller dimension.

However, that is the only disappointment in an otherwise very satisfying book. There are wonderful scenes in The Risk Pool, especially those in which the sensitive and impressionable Ned is introduced to the mysteries of adult life. Russo writes with genuine passion and authority; his ear for dialogue is so acute that one can almost hear the characters speaking.

The primary suspense of the novel lies in the choices Ned will make for his own life; and, in the end, Sam Hall exerts a powerful influence on his son's future. But it is the influence of his unconditional love, rather than the example of his own shady, desperate life, that does the job.