‘Mohawk’ captures town in process of decay

Mohawk was Richard Russo’s first novel and the first of several that take place in a small town in mid-New York State – the Appalachians are not far.

This particular town is called Mohawk. Mohawk had had a thriving leather tanning business, though it is now in the process of disintegration. So is the town.  The people, as in Russo’s other novels, tend to gather at the local grill, this one run by Harry.

One of the principal families of Mohawk is the Groves, made up of Mather, a tanner, who, in his 60s, is dying from his addiction to smoking, but is the most moral man of the novel. Although, he is such a solitary man, it is hard for the family to rustle up enough people to carry his casket at his funeral.

His wife – married to him at age 17 – is very concerned with appearances – feeling that an oxygen tent would not look good in the living room.

Their daughter, Ann, is and has been in love with Dan – who is condemned to a wheelchair – but lets her cousin marry him; allowing herself to sleep with him every 10 years or so.

Instead of Dan, she marries Dallas – and divorces him – as he is hardly a responsible man. Some readers think of  him as the precursor of Sully of Nobody’s Fool, the character Paul Newman played so memorably in the movie by that name.

Their son, Randall, who has earlier consulted his grandfather concerning morality, became a hero when he rescues the town idiot from a building being destroyed, but later struggles with that morality as he grows up.

He leaves college, evades the draft, gradually dumbs down his language and picks up his drinking to be more at home in Mohawk,  finally participating in a plan that involves stolen leather. His story is the saddest, and he is somewhat of a tragic figure as he tries to emulate the lesser, rougher young men of Mohawk.

Not that Russo sentimentalizes – far from it – he sets up situations from which the reader draws his or her own conclusions.

And then there is the Gaffney family – but there are so many – all sharply-drawn people, interacting with each other making up the failing town.

Russo is so good at painting the picture with sharply drawn language and continuing action and interaction: happenings keep happening.  The characters follow their small town destinies and the reader has a three-dimensional, vivid picture of an eastern town that is falling apart.

The author has taken over this theme, and though each town is different, he knows them so well and animates them with realistic, sympathetically drawn people whose situations he builds to a dramatic series of happenings.

Russo has a unique gift and employs his considerable writing skills to give his readers this three-dimensional picture of the people in a small town in the process of decay.

Book info:
Mohawk
By Richard Russo
Alfred Knopf, $25.95

Posted by Rae Eastman on February 21, 2013. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Book Reviews,Columns,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry