Haters thought I couldn't do it. They were constantly doubting me and making negative remarks. But guess what? I proved them all wrong. I finished it! And let me tell you, it was an amazing experience. I genuinely had multiple laughs while reading this. It was so entertaining and enjoyable. I love my slush book. It's so lovely. It's like a little treasure that brings joy and happiness to my life. Every time I pick it up, I get lost in its pages and forget about all the haters and their negativity. I'm so proud of myself for not giving up and for achieving this goal. It just goes to show that with determination and hard work, anything is possible.

I always have this odd feeling that I'm kind of a sucker for enjoying Richard Russo novels as much as I do. He really plays the "looking back on your life, wistfully" card to the absolute hilt. But you know what? It doesn't matter. The guy has this amazing ability to tell a long, mostly uneventful story about vaguely interesting men, and he does it better than most. In "Risk Pool", his second novel from 1988, he had me completely engaged from start to finish. I was chuckling out loud at some parts, getting a bit teary-eyed at others. It was a full range of emotions.

"Risk Pool" takes place in the fictional town of Mohawk, New York. It's a dreary post-industrial town filled with bitter, drunken men and the women they leave behind. But what sets Russo apart is that instead of sneering at these emotional and professional losers, he clearly and genuinely likes these people and this town. He imbues the story with such enormous heart that it's impossible not to get caught up in it.

Does the plot itself even matter? Well, not really. It's told by Ned Hall, and it's essentially just a look back on his entire life from the vantage point of middle age. Maybe half the book is spent on his childhood and adolescence. Sure, events occur, and Ned's father, Sam, a small-town rogue, is a terrific character. You definitely want to know what happens to all of these people you spend about 450 pages with. But at its core, "Risk Pool" is really about feelings. And, I guess, I really like feeling things when I read.

When Peyton Manning shouted audibles throughout his NFL career, until his last games as quarterback, the name "Omaha" was frequently heard. Similarly, in upstate New York, Russo's fictional town of "Mohawk" is like an "Anytown, U.S.A." The tannery and leather trades, which once brought prosperity until WWII, have long since vanished.

"The Risk Pool" (1986) followed Russo's first novel "Mohawk" and is a Bildungsroman like "Empire Falls," "Nobody's Fool," "Everybody's Fool," and "Bridge of Sighs." These stories are set in Mohawk or similar towns on the Northeastern Seaboard. They focus not on plot but on the complex interactions of the town's residents.

The sign welcomes you to Mohawk with "Plenty of Parking," but the mood is more upbeat than expected. In this novel, Russo creates a signature protagonist in the narrator's father, Sam "Sammy" Hall, known as the town's badboy. His self-deprecating charm is overshadowed by his drinking, fighting, gambling, and disappearing acts. He also has a problem with his girlfriend's son, Drew Littler, whom he calls "Zero."

The narrator, Ned Hall, tells the story in the first person, revealing Russo's trademark dysfunctional mother-and-son relationships. Mothers in Russo's stories often rely on delusions, take pills, have crying jags, and exhibit neurotic behaviors. It seems Russo is drawing on personal experiences, which is sad if true.

Despite this, Russo is an expert at creating characters and dialogue, adding introspective insight, sincerity, and emotional depth. His stories are vaguely redemptive, with moralistic outcomes that are not too heavy-handed. This is perhaps why his stories are so well-suited for adaptation to the big screen. It's easy to picture Paul Newman as the flawed but loveable father figures in Russo's stories.

I took this with me to Mr. Russo's talk at the Bath Library last night.

The talk was truly enjoyable and captivating. I was thrilled to get his signature on the title page. How cool is that!

After having two consecutive less-than-satisfactory novel-reading experiences, I knew I had to turn to an old reliable. RR isn't exactly a friend, but I have actually had a conversation with him (as mentioned above). And I really do like his writing - a great deal. This is, I believe, his second book, and it is very much based on his own life. His father, just like the loser in the book, was a rambling, gambling man. The charismatic Sully in two later books is also largely based on him.

We get a bit of the fishing thing from "The Sun Also Rises".

This book is definitely more about Dad than Mom. However, if you've read Russo's memoir "Elsewhere", you will easily recognize RR's troubled mother in this book. The father theme comes up in "Nobody's Fool" (doubled), "Empire Falls" (Paul Newman played in both movies!), and to a lesser extent in "Everybody's Fool", while the mom thing is present to a lesser degree in "Nobody's Fool" in the form of Sully's crazy ex-wife Vera. In "Nobody's Fool", Sully has three sons: his real adult son, that son's older son, and his sort-of son Rub. It's interesting to see how authors incorporate their own life experiences into their writing.

I'm well into the book now and have raised my rating to 4* as Russo managed to make me laugh and cry last night. All that bar chatter is really great too. If you've read enough of RR's works, you can understand the threads that run through "The Risk Pool", "Nobody's Fool", "Empire Falls", and "Bridge of Sighs", and which connect to the "real" world of RR's hometown of Gloversville, NY, and to RR's upbringing there under tumultuous family circumstances. That's what "Elsewhere" is about. All good stuff... kind of related to Edward St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series, come to think of it.

I'm getting near the end of this deceptively long book - almost 500 pages. There were times last night when I wanted to give it a 5* rating, but then later on, I felt like I was getting tired of all the stories. It does go on a bit. I guess RR had a lot of things he wanted to share about his own youth. Naturally, I suppose, he would have thought highly of its compelling nature. Still, the continuous unfolding of this sympathetic look not only at the odd upbringing of Ned but also the journey through time of the town of Mohawk and its many strange inhabitants may be the most "real" of Russo's books. Less of a fable, more of a history.

More "you see"s crop up, especially when Tria's mother is talking.

In the Navy, a duffel bag is called a sea bag. Other writers have made the same mistake.

This should be a miniseries!

The Sam-Ned relationship appears again in "Nobody's Fool" with Sully and his son.

Jerry-rigged vs Jury-rigged vs Jerry-built. Jerry-rigged is used by Russo, but it's actually sort of the bastard child of Jury-rigged (originally a nautical term meaning a temporary solution) and Jerry-built (meaning cheaply made).

I almost finished last night, but the clock said "go to bed", and I obeyed. Near the end, we do get some middle-class melodrama/novel-ey kind of stuff with the story of Drew. Oh well. Things are basically winding down as Ned sees the light at the end of the hometown tunnel and realizes it's a slow-moving freight train.

I think Balboa Island is a lot closer to L.A. than San Diego. Maybe RR was thinking of Coronado?

I finally finished by staying up a bit late. The book's conclusion was sort of predictable and a bit of a letdown. Ned's post-Mohawk life, when he finally gets it going, was a bit boring. Ned himself was an opaque and withholding person. Aloof? Maybe that was part of RR's point. The outcome of a crazy-chaotic family life may well be a personality with an excess of detachment. The book was mostly about Mohawk and Sam Hall, not the narrator, even though the narrator was very much involved in the events. And yet, the character of the narrator was not very impactful. Strange...

4* for the portraits of Sam and Mohawk.

Richard Russo has a deep affection for spending a significant amount of time in upstate New York. After penning his first novel, “Mohawk,” he followed it up with this one. Set in Mohawk years after the events of the first, it features many of the same characters.

The main character in “The Risk Pool” is Sam Hall, the father of Ned, our narrator. Calling him a “ne’er-do-well” might give him a more charming identity than the real Sam. Suffice it to say, Sam is a bit of a troublemaker in a town that already has its fair share of hellions. He is most definitely an alcoholic, mainly addicted to beer. He spends most evenings strolling down Main Street, stopping at each watering hole where he is inevitably shouted at least one free beer and manages to con his way into getting more.

His long-suffering wife eventually abandons him after a nervous breakdown and an addiction to tranquilizers. She moves on to marry the distinguished lawyer F. William Peterson and flees with him to California. Sam’s true love is Eileen, but he can never hold his life together long enough to marry her. She finally marries a small and insignificant man and lives unhappily too close to Sam.

Ned, in the meantime, endures the occasional head slap and numerous indignities at the hands of his father but still adores him in his own way. Sam is a Normandy Beach survivor and tougher than he appears. His shining moment for Ned is the night he confronted Drew Littler, a 250-pound football player and weight lifter of questionable parentage. Sam finally had enough of the challenges from the younger and bigger Drew and agreed to arm-wrestle him. The result was Drew with an injured arm, lying flat on his back in a bar in Mohawk.

Meanwhile, Ned falls in love (for the first time) with Tria Ward, the daughter of the man in the “jewel house” high up on the hill. Not one to spend his love carelessly, Ned quietly plans to leave Mohawk and eventually does. He is away long enough to obtain a degree “out West” and scandalize his way out of graduate school before getting his Master’s.

Sam struggles to escape the bottom of the insurance company’s risk pool but fails. His life gently but surely trends downward as Ned moves to New York to pursue a career as an editor and enters into a relationship with Leigh, who we hardly get to know as she appears so late in the novel.

As the story reaches its inevitable conclusion, we can’t help but notice that we have been on a spectacularly well-written journey through the lives of a loving son and his loving father, even though love is clearly a subtext in the story. There are pages filled with great humor and pages of poetic beauty, often on the same page. Russo is one of my favorite authors, perhaps because he writes so fluidly and with such apparent ease. You could spend weeks reading all of Russo’s novels set in the same location, with a similar tone. The series of “Fool” novels are excellent examples of the continuation of the Mohawk books. Pick up any of them and be transported into a wonderworld of strange and hypnotically fascinating characters and settings. Russo is truly a genius. Read his works and discover why.

This is the second novel penned by the American novelist Richard Russo, and the second one of his that I have delved into.

On the cover, a blurb proclaims that a reader adored the characters in this novel in the same way he loved the characters in John Irving's The World According to Garp. While I can somewhat see that comparison, if we're seeking predecessors, I feel this leans more towards Saul Bellow than John Irving.

The novel is set in Mohawk County, NY, which is both a sort of place and not really a place. Our narrator, Ned Hall, commences by recounting his father's return from the war, his decision to become a professional partier (in the very blue-collar manner of upstate New York), and how things become convoluted when he impregnates Ned's mom and then Ned is born.

There's a back-and-forth stalker/abuse dynamic (albeit told in a folksy way) between Ned's parents as they manage to finally sort out staying married but separated. The remainder of the novel unfolds as Ned divides his time between living with his mother initially, then after she has a nervous breakdown, with his father for years, and later back with his mother. The final part of the novel involves Ned in his college years, graduate school years, and early 30s.

The novel at times seems to struggle with determining its tone. And that's where I stood with this novel until a truly crucial moment when Ned, the narrator, confesses that at the time of a particular event when he's 10, he's appalled at how little he was thinking about his mother. So, while I felt the novel spent a great deal of time skimming over the violence and trauma underlying so many of the events, what becomes evident after this is that Ned is entirely incapable of seeing and comprehending the trauma he's endured. This becomes abundantly clear when Ned is an adult and his trauma is manifested in his approach to the world. This novel gives the impression of a bygone era, but I think, like other Russo novels, it holds its own as a kind of blue-collar American contemporary Dickens.

In a small town, there is a group of goofy and loser characters. Amidst them, a kid is growing up, striving to lead a reasonable life. And his dad happens to be one of the biggest losers of all.

About one-third of the way through, I was rather disappointed as nothing seemed to be happening. However, I'm glad I persisted. As the story progresses, you gradually get attached to these characters.

I found myself feeling a certain degree of sympathy for this kid and his dad. As they both age, they are trying to establish a connection and relate to each other. It's a touching and relatable aspect of the story that makes you reflect on the relationships in your own life.

The characters, despite their flaws and goofiness, have a certain charm that draws you in and makes you root for them. It's a reminder that even in the most ordinary of places and among the most unlikely of people, there are stories worth telling and emotions worth exploring.

Overall, although the beginning may seem slow, the story ultimately pays off with its engaging characters and poignant themes.

It took me a while to truly engage with this book, but once I did, it proved to be a rather enjoyable read.

Russo's characters and the events that unfold in the story possess an air of authenticity. I suspect he has drawn inspiration from real life and incorporated it into this work. The characters are distinct and memorable, mostly underdogs (at least in the eyes of the outside world beyond Mohawk, NY where the story is set), yet they each have redeeming qualities. I'm impressed by the way Russo seems to embrace his characters without passing judgment. He does, however, come up with some rather offbeat nicknames like "Waxy," "Wussy," "Tree," and "Smooth," to name just a few.

The book appears to have a certain structure, being divided into four long sections. However, I didn't notice much variation in theme or impact from one section to the next. The book is rather long and self-indulgent, with the author seemingly allowing the story to unfold on its own. Nevertheless, the stories are generally good, the dialogue is believable, and there are moments that will make you laugh out loud. In the end, it seems to me that the essence of this book is captured by a character named "Smooth" towards the end when he says, "Whatever else you said about it, life was entertaining as hell."

Where the book falls short is in the area of poignancy. Somehow, Ned's loves and the several deaths in the story seem more ordinary than one might expect.

It was interesting to read this book immediately after finishing "Eddie's Bastard" by William Kosinski. Both stories are set in a declining town in upstate New York and center around a boy raised in a Catholic home by a single parent. This book is tangibly better than "Eddie." The writing is superior, the humor is effective, and the characters are more skillfully drawn. However, for the first couple of hundred pages of reading this novel, I couldn't shake the feeling of deja vu.

My first encounter with Russo's work was truly an eye-opener.

It's as if you carefully list down all the characteristics you desire in the man you plan to marry, only to end up falling head over heels for someone who is the complete opposite.

The books and authors I usually gravitate towards are those with captivating plots, multifaceted and evolving characters, and writing that is both brilliant and clever. That's my ideal checklist.

This particular book, however, has a plot that is below average, fully developed and rich characters who seem to be going nowhere, and writing that isn't exactly academically outstanding.

But despite all that, I absolutely loved it!

Russo has an uncanny ability to capture the essence of a small town. That's why the plot and characters may seem to be stagnant. The repetitive writing serves to emphasize the nature of the stories and the people from these towns. The similes he uses to create the ambiance are simply hilarious and bring joy, while the bantering makes you feel as if you are right there in the midst of it all. And as for the plot, well, it was actually quite awesome. There was so much love, surprise, and development.

I'm really looking forward to reading a whole lot more of Russo's works.

A brilliant novel awaits you, the true impact of which can only be fully grasped and appreciated upon reaching the very end.

It is part coming of age story, taking you on a journey through the growth and self-discovery of the characters.

It is also part meditation on the complex and profound ties that bind families together, exploring the similarities and differences between parents and children.

Furthermore, it serves as a documentary about the gradual decay of a small town in New York.

Russo masterfully weaves these disparate threads into a unique and captivating tapestry, vividly showing the lives of quiet desperation lived by the inhabitants of Mohawk, NY.

The novel begins with Ned Hall relating the tale of his parents' courtship and their hasty marriage just before his father, Sam, departs for Europe to fight in WWII.

His wife, Jenny, claims that Sam was a changed man upon his return, but Ned can't help but wonder if that is truly the case.

If such thought-provoking questions pique your interest, then you are likely to find an abundance of enjoyment within the pages of this remarkable book.

This is, oddly enough, the second semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel centered around a complicated relationship and published in the 1980s by a famous, award-winning writer that I've read this month.

Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood was the first. This one is also quite good, although it is very long and there were some less interesting sections.

It covers four periods in the narrator, Ned Hall's, life. The focus is on his relationship with his immature and irresponsible father. The father walks out on him and his mother, but then steps up for a period of time when his mother is hospitalized after a mental breakdown.

There are at least three minor characters who die in gruesome accidents. These deaths are only mentioned briefly, which is a bit odd. It makes one wonder if there is more to these characters and their fates that the author chose not to explore in depth. Overall, despite its flaws, the novel offers an interesting look at the complexities of family relationships and the process of growing up.

I randomly picked up this book, not being overly familiar with Russo's work. However, I'm extremely glad that I did.

As it turned out, this book was the best one that I have read in a long while. It tells the story of a boy who goes to live with his estranged deadbeat father.

The story is filled with various emotions. At times, it can be deeply emotional, touching the reader's heartstrings. Yet, it is also often funny, bringing laughter and joy. And throughout, it is always highly entertaining, keeping the reader engaged from start to finish.

Since then, I have read "Nobody's Fool" which is also well worth reading. And I have picked up "Empire Falls" which I will read soon.

It seems that Russo is well on track to becoming one of my new favorite authors. His writing style, the engaging stories he tells, and the way he develops his characters all contribute to making his books a pleasure to read. I'm looking forward to exploring more of his works in the future.