SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Sticking around with Dad.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (13 September 1988): 3, 8.

In the following review, Eder comments that, despite the novel's “impeccable” realism, the weak protagonist in The Risk Pool ultimately makes the novel a “bore.”

The American archetype, the loner, the cowboy, the man who rides into town, gives it a clout or two and rides off into the sunset: His virtue, above all, is to ride off.

He doesn't stick around. Around, he wouldn't be interesting. Around, he would be a pest.

For around, in life and fiction, we need another kind of character: one who works into society and tugs its strings—if not so hard as to bring it all down, then just hard enough to alter its shape and make it budge; and who gets entangled in those strings, has his own shape altered, and budges.

The narrator of Richard Russo's...