The Risk Pool - (Vintage Contemporaries) by Richard Russo (Paperback)

About the Book

Sweeping, humorous and greatly moving, The Risk Pool is a 30-year saga of Sam Hall, a roguish hellraiser, and of his introspective son, Ned. When Sam abandons the family, Ned vacillates between his nervous mother and his reckless father, struggling to win his father's affection.

Book Synopsis

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls comes a wonderfully funny novel set in Mohawk, New York, where Ned Hall is doing his best to grow up, even though neither of his estranged parents can properly be called adult.

"Superbly original and maliciously funny." --The New York Times Book Review

His father, Sam, cultivates bad habits so assiduously that he is stuck at the bottom of his auto insurance risk pool. His mother, Jenny, is slowly going crazy from resentment at a husband who refuses either to stay or to stay away. As Ned veers between allegiances to these grossly inadequate role models, Richard Russo gives us a book that overflows with outsized characters and outlandish predicaments and whose vision of family is at once irreverent and unexpectedly moving.

Look for Richard Russo's new book, Somebody's Fool, coming soon.

Review Quotes

"Russo proves himself a master at evoking the sights, feelings, and smells of a town.... [The Risk Pool is] superbly original and maliciously funny." --The New York Times Book Review

"A fine, closely observed novel ... Richard Russo writes with such sympathy and attention to the rhythms of small-town life that he invests inarticulate lives with genuine passion.... [He] has succeeded in creating characters with the emotional weight of people we've known in real life." --The New York Times

"Weighted with wonderful detail ... a rich, anecdotal novel brimming with the metaphorical lessons of adolescence: on pocket billiards and sexual frustration, trout fishing and serenity." --The Boston Globe

"Richard Russo has it just perfect in The Risk Pool. A gem of a novel." --St. Louis Post-Dispatch

About the Author

RICHARD RUSSO is the author of nine novels, most recently Chances Are..., Everybody's Fool and That Old Cape Magic; two collections of stories; and the memoir Elsewhere. In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, which, like Nobody's Fool, was adapted into a multiple-award-winning miniseries; in 2017, he received France's Grand Prix de Littérature Américaine. He lives in Port­land, Maine.