SOURCE: Abel, Betty. “Quarterly Fiction Review.” Contemporary Review 254, no. 1479 (April 1989): 213-16.

In the following excerpt, Abel offers a positive assessment of The Risk Pool, calling Russo's prose “witty, easy and nostalgic in tone.”

Richard Russo's novel The Risk Pool, is another American work that has crossed the Atlantic with every chance of success. Russo achieved fame first with his book entitled Mohawk, a moving love story set in an imaginary New York town. In The Risk Pool Richard Russo returns to Mohawk to unfold the further tale of thirty years in the hell-raising life of Sam Hall. Hall returns from World War II, only to abandon his wife Jenny and their baby Ned. Several years later, he returns in search of his son, thus causing Ned to spend the next twenty years shuttling both physically and emotionally between his estranged parents, trying hard to gain acceptance from his...