Reading Order
The Risk Pool Reading Order
The Risk Pool (1988) by Richard Russo is his second novel and the most autobiographical — the story of Ned Hall and his feckless father Sam, set in the fictional Mohawk, New York, a dying mill town in the upstate New York that Russo knows intimately. Ned grows up with his mother in a rented house, his father Sam absent and unreliable, appearing and disappearing as the mood takes him, always charming, always irresponsible, always broke. When Ned is a teenager, his mother has a breakdown and is institutionalized, and he is forced to move in with Sam and his various companions — the bar regulars and pool-players and working-class wanderers of Mohawk's underworld. The Risk Pool is a father-son novel and a coming-of-age novel and a specific portrait of a specific kind of American fecklessness — Sam Hall is charming and irresponsible in a way that the novel refuses to romanticize or condemn completely: Sam is who he is, entirely, and Ned must figure out how much of his father he has become. The Risk Pool anticipates the concerns of Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool — the dying mill town, the working-class community, the comedy and tragedy of specific American lives — but it has an autobiographical intimacy that the later novels don't have.
Where to start
The Risk Pool — any Vintage paperback. Second novel, published 1988; better as a fourth or fifth Russo after reading Empire Falls, Nobody's Fool, and Straight Man, because knowing Russo's full range helps place The Risk Pool's autobiographical intimacy.
Complete The Risk Pool Book List
- 1Buy
The Risk Pool
Richard Russo·1988·The novel — Ned Hall's adolescence in Mohawk, New York, with his feckless father Sam after his mother's breakdown; Russo's most autobiographical novel and the early version of the upstate New York world he would develop in Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool. - 2Buy
Empire Falls
Richard Russo·2001·Russo's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — the fullest realization of the dying mill town world The Risk Pool first establishes; the companion in his mature fiction. - 3Buy
Nobody's Fool
Richard Russo·1993·Russo's great working-class comic novel — the companion in his upstate New York fiction; Sam Hall of The Risk Pool and Sully Sullivan of Nobody's Fool are related characters — the charming, irresponsible male who is the world's natural fool. - 4Buy
Straight Man
Richard Russo·1997·Russo's most comic novel — the companion in his fiction; knowing what Ned Hall becomes (or could become) helps place the more distant comedy of Straight Man's academic world. - 5Buy
Bridge of Sighs
Richard Russo·2007·Russo's most meditative novel — the companion in his upstate New York fiction; where The Risk Pool is autobiographical and intimate, Bridge of Sighs is panoramic; both are about men who must reckon with the fathers they had and the towns they came from. - 6Buy
A Death in the Family
James Agee·1957·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. - 7Buy
The Prince of Tides
Pat Conroy·1986·Conroy's Southern gothic novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about difficult fathers and the sons who are shaped by them; 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. - 8Buy
Vineland
Thomas Pynchon·1990·Pynchon's most accessible novel — a Northern California story about parents and their adult children, America in the 1980s; the companion in American fiction about the legacy of the 1960s generation on their children, in a more comic and paranoid register than The Risk Pool.
The Risk Pool — Frequently Asked Questions
What is The Risk Pool about?
The Risk Pool follows Ned Hall from childhood to early adulthood in Mohawk, New York. Ned grows up primarily with his mother Jenny in a modest rented house, his father Sam absent and unreliable, appearing and disappearing with his characteristic charming irresponsibility. When Ned is a teenager, his mother has a breakdown related to her obsessive cleaning — she is hospitalized — and Ned is forced to move in with his father Sam, who lives among Mohawk's working-class bar culture: pool-players, drifters, the regulars of the Mohawk Grill. The novel follows Ned's education in his father's world and his slow, complicated understanding of who Sam Hall is and who he himself is becoming.
What kind of person is Sam Hall?
Sam Hall is one of Russo's great characters — a charming, irresponsible man who is at home in the world's underside: bars, poker games, pool halls, the irregular economy of working-class upstate New York. He is not malicious but he is not responsible — he does what he feels like, pays attention to what interests him, and is reliably charming and unreliable about everything else. The novel neither condemns nor romanticizes Sam: he is who he is, entirely, and the question the novel is asking is what it does to a son to grow up with a father like that. The answer is complicated: Ned has inherited some of Sam's charm and some of his irresponsibility, and the novel is about whether he can choose which parts of his father to keep.
How autobiographical is The Risk Pool?
The Risk Pool is Russo's most autobiographical novel — the Mohawk world is closely based on Gloversville, New York, where Russo grew up, and the father-son relationship draws on Russo's own experience with his father. Russo has been fairly open about this autobiographical dimension in interviews. The novel has the intimacy and the specificity of lived experience in a way that his later, more Dickensian novels don't — Empire Falls and Nobody's Fool are more clearly inventions, even if they draw on the same world. The Risk Pool is also more melancholy than the later novels, less confident in comedy as a response to the world it depicts.
What is the significance of the town of Mohawk?
Mohawk is Russo's fictional version of Gloversville, New York, a town whose economy was built on leather gloves manufacturing and that declined as the industry moved elsewhere. In The Risk Pool (and in his first novel Mohawk), Russo establishes the town as his primary fictional setting — the dying upstate New York mill town that appears in various fictional versions throughout his career. The specific texture of this world — the bar culture, the seasonal unemployment, the class distinctions between the mill owners and the mill workers, the particular humor of people whose expectations have been lowered by economic reality — is the foundation of Russo's comic and tragic imagination.
What should I read after The Risk Pool?
After The Risk Pool, Empire Falls (2001) and Nobody's Fool (1993) are the fullest realizations of the world The Risk Pool establishes. Russo's first novel Mohawk (1986) is the companion in his early Mohawk fiction. For American fiction about father-son relationships in working-class settings, James Agee's A Death in the Family is the most important literary companion. For the autobiographical mode in American fiction, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes is the memoir companion.
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