[In the following review, McConkey argues that the “great triumph” of The Risk Pool lies in the novel's complex father-son relationship.]

Richard Russo's second novel returns us to the locale of his first, Mohawk (1986)—Mohawk being the name he gives that northern New York town peopled with characters of his imagination but apparently based on the actual Gloversville.

The Risk Pool is less a sequel than a palimpsest of that highly praised first novel. The two books chronicle much of the same time span, and a number of the minor characters from the first reappear in the second. While the two major characters of The Risk Pool are new to it, the reader can catch in their depiction certain glimmerings of their origin in the earlier work. Ned Hall, the first person narrator of The Risk Pool, emerges from Randall Younger, the central character of the earlier, third-person narrative; and Sam Hall is a striking development of the less life-celebratory Dallas Younger, Randall's father.

I admire Mohawk, but not its manufactured resolution in a melodramatic storm and hospital fire. Russo avoids such a flaw in The Risk Pool—though the novel is even more ambitious. It is both the traditional development novel of an artist (Ned, the narrator, may end up an editor but he is, after all, the supposed teller of the tale) and the trajectory of the life of another who seems quite unlike him—Ned's own father, a road construction worker and habitué of the local bars.

Ned has to grow through a conventional American misapprehension (the romanticizing of wealth into a spiritual ideal) as part of his maturation. Indeed, the mold from which he has to extricate himself was shaped by one of the most American of all novels, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Gatsby's romantic yearning for the green light across the bay becomes Ned's infatuation with the distant great house, gleaming like a jewel in the sun, that overlooks Mohawk from its hilltop location. Here the members of the wealthiest family in the community live, including the daughter to whom Ned inevitably will be attracted. The wake at the house for that daughter's father is a social gathering reminiscent of one of Gatsby's parties.

Ned's desire for the girl deserts him upon the sexual consummation. When illusion goes, what is left? Ned suffers all the uncertainties of our relativistic age, and as a consequence is far too passive to be interesting in himself. He spends much more of his growing-up with his mother than with his father, but she (despite or because of mental illness) remains a vaguely-realized figure. Contributing to Ned's inability to act is a hang-up about genetic inheritance which causes him to worry that any offspring, however delightful in youth, will age into a duplicate of the usually disliked parent of the same sex—a seeming obsession from which the author doesn't dissociate himself, suggesting that for him it may simply be a biological truth.

The great triumph of the novel—its depiction of Sam Hall's life—is a working out of this particular obsession or genetic fact through an almost subterranean acceptance of it. For author and reader alike, Ned only truly lives through the father he depicts. As Ned presents it, Sam's trajectory is completely believable—from his days of generosity and strength, of brawlings and self-confidence, through his period of inevitable decline. He suffers from alcoholism and loneliness as well as the cancer that will kill him, and the pride he once felt in himself becomes a pride in his son. (As son merges into father in the telling of this story, so father merges into son at its conclusion.) What gives suspense to Sam's story is not an Oedipal conflict between father and son (the mother, after all, barely exists) but a kind of transference of such a conflict to Sam and the young tough he contemptuously calls “Zero,” the iron-pumping and motorcycle-riding son of one of his female friends. If Sam again and again taunts and overpowers Zero, we know that eventually the roles will be reversed.

Ned may fade from our minds upon finishing the book, but not the characterization of Sam that Russo permits him. It's hard to resist a man who tells his son, following a struggle—with a berserk Zero—that results in a broken finger and the destruction of much of his apartment. “Things get bad sometimes. … It's nothing to worry about. It doesn't mean a thing. … If it meant something, it'd be different,” and who then reflectively adds, “But it's just how things are.”