SOURCE: McConkey, James. “Life with Father and Son.” Washington Post Book World 18, no. 48 (27 November 1988): 7.

In the following review, McConkey argues that the “great triumph” of The Risk Pool lies in the novel's complex father-son relationship.

Richard Russo's second novel returns us to the locale of his first, Mohawk (1986)—Mohawk being the name he gives that northern New York town peopled with characters of his imagination but apparently based on the actual Gloversville.

The Risk Pool is less a sequel than a palimpsest of that highly praised first novel. The two books chronicle much of the same time span, and a number of the minor characters from the first reappear in the second. While the two major characters of The Risk Pool are new to it, the reader can catch in their depiction certain glimmerings of their origin in the earlier work. Ned Hall, the first person narrator of...