Ned, watchful and introspective, is a child when he begins his narration, living with his mother, while his unreliable father Sam is more or less out of the picture –and when is in the picture, it’s rather an ugly one. But Ned, as any boy would, is still curious about his father. Of course, Sam Hall is known to everyone in Mohawk and everyone would agree that Sam is not the best man to be a parent. Yet, when his mother becomes ill, Ned is forced to move in with his hard drinking, rule breaking, addicted to gambling parent. While Sam can be loveable at times, Ned is forced to become part of his father's seedy nocturnal world, which entails touring the town's bars and pool halls, all while struggling to win Sam's affections while avoiding his sins.
Much like John Irving (and many other writers of this type of fiction), Russo adds many autobiographical elements to his tale of Ned Hall, who we follow through four periods of his life, focusing specifically on Hall's relationship with his loutish and, in his best friend's words, "rockheaded" father. Wikipedia: “Many elements of The Risk Pool were based on the author's own experience growing up in Gloversville, NY, a town similar to Russo's fictional Mohawk. Like Mohawk, Gloversville's economy revolves around the leather industry, and both towns suffered economic decline in the second half of the twentieth century.” So yes, Russo breaks no new ground here, as there are a million of these books on the market.
While it’s funny that Ned tries to escape his
small town of Mohawk, only to be drawn back by circumstances, homesickness, and
his failure at maintaining his own existence –which really can be laid at both
his parents’ doorstep, you also feel a bit sad for him. I mean, yes, we all
have known people who somehow have been successful despite the roadblocks that
have been thrown their way, but there is also many who fall into the endless
cycle of repeating the past. I believe this happens more than the latter. And
Ned, whose mother went from a failed marriage to (implied) relationship with a
priest (which ended in a nervous breakdown), to a father who seemly refused to
grow up and accept reasonability (but forced this onto Drew Littler, the son of
women Sam Hall was seeing on and off over the decades) has not grown up
himself.
Russo’s own relationship with his father was mirrored here in The Risk Pool (while sounding like a 1950’s noir title, is used here a metaphor; borrowed from a form of risk management mostly practiced by insurance companies). As he noted in a 1993 San Francisco Chronicle interview, his father "lived a life of studied bad habits," leaving his wife and ignoring his son until he was "old enough to follow him into the OTB and then into the bar and then into the pool hall.”
What makes these novels work is that while towns
like Mohawk, quickly falling into abyss but only marginally trying to save it,
and thus will always remain conservative in its values, they still have pockets
of surrealism existing in its nooks and crannies, bits of weirdness and
bizarreness (something Stephen King is able to tap into) to them that I’ve
always been attracted to.
The Risk Pool was Russo’s second novel, and the story (eventually you realize there really is no real story here) sometimes paces slower that a limping 89-year-old man crossing a busy street. But, while he does go overboard describing things in such great detail (which is the antithesis of recent writers I’ve been reading -see Richard Stark and Gregory MacDonald), there is still a charm to the book. I will admit there was some thought to just tossing it aside, if only because I have so much other stuff to read, but then there are not a lot of writers of Russo’s caliber around anymore, so I carried on. Besides, I still have two more of his books on my shelf, the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Empire Falls and That Old Cape Magic, and I don’t want one book to stop me in my tracks.
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