MOHAWK: RICHARD RUSSO

MOHAWK is Russo' first novel, published in 1986.  Mohawk, a small fictitious town in New York state, reminds readers of Gloversville (forty miles northwest of Albany), once the hub of glove making and the small town where Russo grew up.  The novel follows numerous characters but mainly two families, the prim, proper straight arrow Grouse's and the less than stellar Gaffney's.  Anne Grouse, the forty year old daughter of Mather Grouse would be the most prominent figure, struggling to live up to her father's high standards and moral code and later, after he dies, to put up with her mother, a meddling know it all, with whom she lives with her son, after a divorce from high school sweet heart, Dallas Younger, a good guy with no sense of responsibility or maturity.

Anne not only struggles with her father's past, her mother, Milly but also she has fallen in love with her cousin Diana's husband, Dan, and has known it since high school.  Her son, Randall, complicates the story because he has a hard time fitting in the local high school, befriends the town idiot, Wild Bill Gaffney, and after graduation, goes off to college in Buffalo, drops out, and avoids the draft(it's 1973), and is accused of murdering all three of the Gaffney's towards the end of the book, after sleeping with the elder Gaffney's married granddaughter. Sounds like a soap opera I suppose but it doesn't feel that way when you read it.

Russo has a gift for creating small town life, reminiscent of Thornton Wilder's OUR TOWN, but less abstract more real.  Few are happy in Mohawk, as the town is losing or has lost all its jobs as the leather factory closes down, a result of jobs going overseas and the realization that the tannery has been poisoning the locals with the chemicals it has been pouring into the local river, causing a high number of cancer deaths.

Despite these problems, people go on with their lives; the diner stays open, the men play poker up above, the workers bet the horses each morning before going off to the tannery till it closes.  The trial of young Dallas Younger is the biggest event to hit the town in fifty years, as TV cameras and news stations descend on the town.  Eventually, the case is dropped for lack of evidence, Randall is freed and sneaks out the back door of the court house,  avoiding the Federal officers who have come to arrest him for draft dodging. We never hear of him again. Anne never ends up with her love, Dan,  even though his wife dies at forty, leaving him a widower.  After Randall leaves,  Anne decides to change her life and leaves for Phoenix, putting her mother and her sister in a nursing home where they seem quite happy.  Nothing really ends well; Mather Grouse dies, the Gaffney's, we find out, have been killed by the younger brother who then commits suicide, an anomaly, 'and so it goes,' says Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut's SLAUGHTER HOUSE FIVE.  We assume Anne will find a job in Phoenix, that somehow Randall has managed to avoid the draft, and Dallas Younger, her ex husband does not change,  living from day to day, happy, perhaps the happiest character in the novel.