[In the following review, Clute asserts that Russo's themes in The Risk Pool are ultimately rewarding though the narrative can be meandering and overlong.]

Those who finish The Risk Pool will fully earn any pleasures Richard Russo may have to offer in this, his second novel about life in the small decaying industrial city of Mohawk, sunk in its worn-down valley some miles upriver from Albany, New York. Russo is not an author to worry about inflicting longueurs on his readers, and in Ned Hall he has found an ideal protagonist for the relentless amplitude of his way with a story. Ned has a ghost to lay—his memories of growing up with a hard-drinking scallywag father—and the great length of The Risk Pool neatly exemplifies the compulsiveness of his need to make sense of things.

There is, in fact, not a great deal to discover; what Ned clearly needs is to find out and reiterate certain truths about himself and his family, again and again, until repetition, and the deaths of most of the cast, can free him from the trammels of his upbringing. Sam Hall comes back home from combat in 1945 and makes his wife Jenny pregnant, but soon flees her obdurate and dispiriting fantasies of domesticity. After she has a mental breakdown, the child Ned goes to live with Sam, spending a couple of years in pool-halls, bars and corner grills. Sam is a drinker, a flamboyant raconteur, a scrounger generous with money, a hard man secretly proud of the reticent son who witnesses his life. Though Ned eventually returns to his mother and her fragile delusions, he never abandons Sam, who is the spark and hearth of his mental world, and he writes The Risk Pool to authenticate that bond.

Unfortunately, Ned himself is more sponge than protagonist, and great swathes of The Risk Pool serve only to feed his insatiable need for material, however desultory. Some of the vignettes and anecdotes he recounts are of considerable intrinsic merit, and almost every member of the cast comes startlingly alive, now and then—particularly Drew Littler, the huge, stertorous and deranged son of Sam's best woman friend, and Wusso, a large wise man with black blood and a genius for repartee.

Ned Hall is not unlike the Archer of Ross Macdonald's great series of American thrillers. Both Ned and Archer haunt their worlds like anthropologists—at one point Ned actually pretends to his mother that he has returned home on a university assignment to study Mohawk as a “primitive society”—but Archer's world has secrets to award to the stalker of lives; Ned's has not. There are hints of crimes, and of a violent death occasioned by one of Drew's juggernaut manias; these hints do not reach the surface. The risk pool—a term which describes the kind of insurance shelter available to high-risk drivers like Sam, at swingeing cost—keeps its secrets and its derelicts covered.