Recommendations
Books Like The Risk Pool by Richard Russo
For readers of Russo's most personal novel
If you loved The Risk Pool — Ned Hall's adolescence with his feckless father Sam in Mohawk, New York, the bar culture and working-class world that shapes them, the question of what a son inherits from a father like that — these novels share the same territory: difficult fathers, sons who must reckon with what they've inherited, and the specific texture of working-class American small-town life.
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Buy on AmazonEmpire Falls
by Richard Russo
The Pulitzer-winning companion — Miles Roby in Empire Falls, Maine; the fullest realization of the dying mill town world The Risk Pool first establishes in Mohawk; the place to go after The Risk Pool for Russo's mature fiction.
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Buy on AmazonNobody's Fool
by Richard Russo
The companion in his comic mode — Sully Sullivan in North Bath; Sam Hall of The Risk Pool and Sully Sullivan are related characters in the Russo world, both charming irresponsible men who are exactly themselves; Nobody's Fool shows what that character type looks like from the outside.
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Buy on AmazonBridge of Sighs
by Richard Russo
Russo's most meditative novel — Lou Lynch in Thomaston, New York; the companion in his upstate New York fiction; both The Risk Pool and Bridge of Sighs are about men who must reckon with the fathers they had and the towns they came from.
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Buy on AmazonA Death in the Family
by James Agee
Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a boy whose father dies — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about father-son relationships and what the death or absence of a father does to a boy; Rufus Follet's Knoxville is the Southern version of Ned Hall's Mohawk.
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Buy on AmazonAngela's Ashes
by Frank McCourt
McCourt's Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir — the Irish, more abjectly poor version of the same father-son story; Malachy McCourt's fecklessness and Frank's survival of it is the Irish Catholic version of Sam Hall and Ned's story.
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Buy on AmazonThe Prince of Tides
by Pat Conroy
Conroy's Southern gothic novel about difficult parents and their adult son — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about fathers who damage their children; Tom Wingo's father is the violent Southern version of Sam Hall's charming Northern irresponsibility; both novels are about sons sorting out what they inherited.
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Buy on AmazonHousekeeping
by Marilynne Robinson
Robinson's debut novel — the female companion in the tradition of American fiction about a parent who is present but not present in the way a parent should be; Sylvie's transience and Ruthie's relationship to it is the female, Western version of Ned Hall's relationship to Sam.
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Buy on AmazonThat Old Cape Magic
by Richard Russo
Russo's 2009 novel — the companion in his autobiographical mode; Jack Griffin's complicated relationship with his academic parents and the summers on Cape Cod is Russo's most explicit return to the autobiographical territory of The Risk Pool.
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