October 12, 1986
In Short: Fiction
By GREG JOHNSON
his first novel describes life in Mohawk, a small town in upstate New York, where the leather tanneries are failing, the local waters have been poisoned
by years of chemical dumping, and the people endure lives of quiet desperation occasionally leavened by humor. Presented in 67 brief chapters alternating among a dozen or so characters, the novel has a deliberately fragmented
story line that reveals the connections among these quite disparate lives. Among the principals are Anne, an intelligent, beautiful woman in love with her cousin's husband; Dallas, her feckless but likable former husband;
Randall, her confused teen-age son; and Wild Bill Gaffney, in love with Anne as a boy but now mentally handicapped after a severe beating by his brother. Despite its byzantine plot, the novel delineates good and evil along
simplistic lines. The villains seldom rise above caricature, and the virtuous are merely ineffectual. Most of the minor characters verge on cliche: the gruff but good-hearted proprietor of the local diner, the elderly hypochondriac.
There's an attractive, small-town coziness to much of the story, though - teen-age couples on outings to the lake, a young boy asking his grandfather if there's ever ''any good way to know what's
the right thing to do'' - and it movingly dramatizes an older, innocent way of life giving way to confusion, corruption and violence. The writing, moreover, is brisk, colorful and often witty. These qualities
and the impressive scope of the novel bode well for Richard Russo's future, but the initially strong sympathy he evokes for his characters is gradually lost in the complex windings of plot and structure.
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