The Risk Pool by Richard Russo

This book is cracking me up. I'm less than halfway through but it's made me laugh out loud several times already. Here's the scene I just read:

The narrator is a boy. He's in a restaurant with his father and a man walks in with his daughter, "the most beautiful girl I had ever seen, and she looked about my age." His father talks to the girl for a while and then says,

"I tell you what, how about I introduce you to somebody your own age. He's not as good-looking as his father, but you can't have everything."


Suddenly, everyone was looking at me, as luck would have it, just as a song ended on the jukebox. Tria Ward gave me a weak smile, as if to acknowledge my reality, or perhaps the fact that I wasn't too bad-looking, or that, yes, it was true, I wasn't as as good-looking as my father.


And in response to her beautiful smile, I bleated.


I remember the horror of it even now. The sound I made resembled no word. It didn't even sound human. My father blinked, probably in disbelief, and for long terrible seconds nobody said anything. I flushed so deeply that my skin burned.

That struck me so funny I laughed until I cried and actually had to run to the bathroom to prevent peeing my pants.

The book is separated into four sections named after something the boy's grandpa used to say about Mohawk, the town the book is set in (as are many - maybe all? - of Richard Russo's books):

"There are four season in Mohawk," he always remarked, "Fourth of July, Mohawk Fair, Eat the Bird, and Winter." No way around it, Mohawk winters did cling to our town tenaciously. Deep into spring, when tulips were blooming elsewhere, brown crusted snowbanks still rose high from the terraces along our streets, and although yellow water ran along the curbs, forming tunnels beneath the snow, the banks themselves shrank reluctantly, and it had been known to snow cruelly in May. It was late June before the ground was firm enough for baseball, and by Labor Day the sun had already lost its conviction when the Mohawk Fair opened.

Apologies to my Michigan friends and family, but I thought this was a great description of the weather in Michigan.

I like all of Richard Russo's books that I've read. This one is my favorite, at least so far.