Mohawk

By: Richard Russo

Narrated by: Amanda Carlin

Originally published in 1986 in the Vintage Contemporaries paperback series—and reissued now in hardcover alongside his masterful new novel, Empire Falls—Richard Russo’s Mohawk remains today as it was described then: A first novel with all the assurance of a mature writer at the peak of form and ambition, Mohawk is set in upstate New York and chronicles over a dozen lives in a leather town, long after the tanneries have started closing down. Ranging over three generations—and clustered mainly in two clans, the Grouses and the Gaffneys—these remarkably various lives share only the common human dilemmas and the awesome physical and emotional presence of Mohawk itself.

For this is a town like Winesburg, Ohio or Our Town, in our time, that encompasses a plethora of characters, events and mysteries. At once honestly tragic and sharply, genuinely funny, Mohawk captures life, then affirms it.

Critic reviews

“Richard Russo [is] a masterful storyteller with a mission: to chronicle with insight and compassion the day-to-day life of small-town America . . . alternating episodes of boisterous humor with moments of heart-wrenching pathos . . . His characters are wholly sympathetic, but they are also human.”
—Houston Chronicle

“After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo’s tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life. And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are.”
—Annie Proulx

“Russo is a master craftsman . . . The blue-collar heartache at the center of his fiction has the sheen of Dickens but the epic levity of John Irving.”—Boston Globe

Well Written But Totally depressing

Too depressing. A life of hopelessness. Richard Russo has a knack for making life in his small towns feel totally hopeless.

Russo shows he belongs with this first novel

Having read many of Russo’s novels already I was most impressed at what an excellent technical prose practitioner he was , so young. My overall impression was everything was more serious than his other books. Less tongue in cheek light humor. The eternal struggle between love and duty with the adult children and ageing parents was surreal to me. Seems to be a major aspect of human life. I discovered an interesting bit of trivia after hearing the name Homer Wells in the story. I had just finished John Irving’s “Cider House Rules” before reading Mohawk. It seems Russo pays tribute to Irving by including an episode from CHR where Homer Wells struggles driving his car up a steep hill in a frigid icey Maine winter day trying to reach the summit where a hospital stood. The same scenario in Mohawk. What I discovered was Irving endorsed Mohawk with a highly complimentary comment on his writing which was on the cover of the first release paperback published a year after CHR. Irving was formally including Russo into the exclusive membership of superior fellow New England writers of which Irving was already inducted after Garp.

Good Book

Writing was good , had some likable characters. I like the small town , normal Joe type setting and Russo does that well . My only complaint is with the narrator. She’s dry and monotone. And it took a few try’s to get into the book because of it. About midway she really gets into the story , but before you know if , She’s back to phoning in the computer voice . If you tough it out , the story is worth it , just wished they chosen a different narrator .

Narrator does take some getting used to

Once you get over her weird voice, the story and characters are great. I’ve read almost every Richard Russo book and this one is as great as his others. Another classic American town waiting to become another forgotten place off of the main routes filled with kids and parents, bars and shops, and nothing too spectacular to occupy their time. Always great character development, real people with real motivations. Something to love and hate about every single person you come across in this story.

Drags

Good book. Kind of drags. I seemed to lose track once in a while. Pretty good overall.