The Risk Pool was published by Random House in 1988, Russo’s second novel and first hardcover publication. The book established the thematic concerns he would explore through six subsequent novels: father-son relationships, small-town decline, the tension between escape and loyalty, and the particular damage inflicted by charming, irresponsible men.
Ned Hall grows up in Mohawk (the same fictional town as the debut novel), pulled between his mother Jenny (anxious, respectable, determined to escape the town’s limitations through education and propriety) and his father Sam (absent for years, then suddenly present — a gambler, a drinker, a storyteller, a man incapable of responsibility but magnetic in his carelessness). When Jenny’s mental health collapses, Ned goes to live with Sam — and discovers that his father’s world (bars, pool halls, betting, the company of other unreliable men) offers a freedom his mother’s world never could.
Russo’s treatment of father-son relationship is unsentimental: Sam is genuinely irresponsible (he neglects Ned, forgets promises, disappears for days), but he is also genuinely present in ways Jenny cannot be — he treats Ned as a companion rather than a project, expects nothing of him, and offers unconditional acceptance rather than aspirational pressure.
The “risk pool” is both literal (an insurance term — the pool of insured parties among whom risk is distributed) and metaphorical: the shared community of unreliable men among whom the costs of irresponsibility are dispersed.
Collecting The Risk Pool
First edition (Random House, New York, 1988): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $15–$35
- Signed first edition: $30–$70
- Without jacket: $5–$10