The Risk Pool - Vendido!

by Richard Russo
Vintage
496 pages
Translation: Sobel Weber Associates, Inc.

Rights sold:
*** Editora Landscape - Brasil ***
Anagrama – Spain
Gustac Lubbe Verlag – Germany
Gedins Forlag – Sweden
Editions Table Ronde – France
Artia Produktion – Denmark
Bosch & Keuning – Holland
Chatto & Windus – U.K.

Um dos próximos projetos de Tom Hanks (Estrada Para Perdição) pode ser a adaptação de The Risk Pool, livro de Richard Russo. A produção é da Warner Bros. e Lawrence Kasdan (O Apanhador de Sonhos) fica responsável por roteiro e direção.

O papel de Hanks será o de um ladrão que é obrigado a tomar conta do filho depois que a mãe do garoto sofre um colapso nervoso. Ele, então, começa a levar o menino para bares e salões de jogos, aos poucos o introduzindo no mundo do crime em Nova York. Segundo a Variety, Kasdan está trabalhando em um segundo tratamento do script e pretende começar as filmagens no final do ano.

Tom Hanks Signs On To ’The Risk Pool’
[Sun May 02, 2004 11:37AM]
Tom Hanks is to star as a petty thief and gambler in the adaptation of the Richard Russo novel The Risk Pool for director Lawrence Kasdan (Dreamcatcher) who is also writing the movie, according to Variety.

Set in the same upstate New York location that is the usual haunt in Russo’s books, The Risk Pool tells the story of a man who is suddenly charged with raising his son, after his estranged wife has a nervous breakdown. Hanks will play a charming petty thief and gambler, whose unreliability puts him on the lowest rung of the insurance risk pool.

"(The) father is a charming but unreliable screw-up who introduces this sheltered boy to this wonderful and slightly dark world of pool halls and bars," Kasdan said. "The relationship between them is funny and moving, and I don’t recall being so immediately struck by a book since ’The Accidental Tourist.’ I took it to Tom because I thought he would be so perfect in the role."

Book description
A wonderfully funn and perceptive novel in the traditions of Thornton Wilder and Anne Tyler, The Risk Pool is 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.

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.

Quotes and reviews:
"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." --Boston Globe

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

From Library Journal
A story of not-so-successful folk in a decaying town in New York as seen through the eyes of Ned Hall, better known as "Sam’s son." Sam was once an average citizen who grew up, married, and went off to fight in World War II but returned a drifter. Leaving his wife and small son at home, he would haunt the bars and pool halls and hobnob with his cronies. Now and then he’d appear from nowhere to take Ned with him. When Ned’s mother, Jenny, trips over the edge, Ned goes to live with Sam in a dilapidated loft above the town’s one department store and shares his father’s roguish life. Ned’s 20-year story is filled with wonderfully drawn characters and hilarious adventures but the subtext is one of sadness and near desperation. Highly recommended. Marion Hanscom, SUNY at Binghamton Lib.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Brilliantly fulfilling the promise of his first novel, Mohawk , Russo sets this richly satisfying narrative in the same blue-collar milieu of that fictional upstate New York town. The narrator, Ned Hall, or "Sam Hall’s boy," as he is always identified by his father’s pals, recalls his growing-up years in a community whose seasons are identified as "Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird and Winter." The unconventional upbringing that contributes to his pessimistic view of life is the result of the ongoing war between his parents. Sam Hall, as feckless, inept and irresponsible a charmer as has ever been conjured to fictional life, abandons his wife and son for the best part of 12 years while he becomes a barfly, petty thief and gambler, a generally disreputable citizen whose status in the lowest depths of the insurance risk pool typifies his harum-scarum existence. He claims adolescent Ned after his mother’s nervous breakdown, however, and the two years father and son spend together are the essence of this chronicle of complex parental and filial relationships. Under his father’s tutelege Ned learns to lie and cheat, steal and play poolindeed, to remake himself in his father’s imageand it is not until two decades later that he realizes he has also learned about the redemptive power of love. Russo writes in a prose style as seductive as spring: the novel has a vigorous pace, sharply witty dialogue and a liberal helping of hilarious scenes. The book’s depiction of a community fallen on hard times, its vividly delineated characters, and its sensitive portrayal of a boy bewildered by the conditions of his life and learning to adapt to hardship, neglect and a curious kind of off-hand love all pack an emotional wallop. This is a novel whose intelligence will appeal to discriminating readers, whose chronicling of picaresque misadventures will vastly entertain, and whose compassionate evocation of lower middle-class people struggling to find dignity and happiness will strike home with universal truths. In short, it’s as good a novel as we are likely to get this year. BOMC and QPBC alternates.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc

About the author

Copyright of the photo: J.D. Sloan

Richard Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, the small, mostly working-class town that has served as the prototype for his fictional Mohawk and North Bath. His parents were separated, and he recalls his father as a man who "lived a life of studied bad habits. I became of interest to him when I got old enough to follow him into the OTB and then into the bar and then into the pool hall, when I could be taken to the places he went and not interrupt the rhythm of his life."

With his father, Russo worked construction jobs during his vacations from the University of Arizona, where he received his B.A. He later went on to get a master’s degree and had almost earned his Ph.D. in American literature when it occurred to him that he would rather write his own novels than analyze other people’s. He is the author of three books, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody’s Fool, which has recently been made into a feature film starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Richard Russo teaches writing at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He lives there with his wife, Barbara, and their two daughters.