Sticking Around With Dad : THE RISK POOL <i> by Richard Russo (Random House: $19.95; 576 pp.) </i>

The American archetype, the loner, the cowboy, the man who rides into town, gives it a clout or two and rides off into the sunset: His virtue, above all, is to ride off.

He doesn’t stick around. Around, he wouldn’t be interesting. Around, he would be a pest.

For around , in life and fiction, we need another kind of character: one who works into society and tugs its strings--if not so hard as to bring it all down, then just hard enough to alter its shape and make it budge; and who gets entangled in those strings, has his own shape altered, and budges.

The narrator of Richard Russo’s “The Risk Pool” is an uneasy settled man whose story is a lament for his cowboy father. Sam Hall--as in the song “My Name it is Sam Hall, and I hate you one and all”--is a becalmed cowboy who sticks around.

In fact, he is a highway construction worker and not a cowboy; he lives in a depressed Upstate New York town and not in the West, and he runs off periodically. But it amounts to sticking around. He always comes back.

“The Risk Pool” tries to fuse the aura of an eccentric loner hero with that of a departed, outsize father. The narrator seeks his own identity by revisiting the broken ground of the bumpy relationship.

It is an inward-turning theme, and it has been heavily worked in our fiction of recent decades. It must be said that Russo, though he makes an appealing effort, works it heavily. His book brings back a place--the town of Mohawk--and a number of lives whose obscurity he will redeem by lighting them up. He strikes matches but some misfire and others catch for only a few moments.

We meet Sam Hall more or less in mid-brawl. He slugs the lawyer who comes to tell him that his wife, Jenny, wants a divorce. The marriage had lasted for the years Sam was away in World War II, and only a little while after his return and the birth of Ned, the narrator. Jenny was fed up with a husband who spent most of his time with his cronies at the local bars.

For the next 30 years or so--the time covered by the novel--Sam will come and go, work for a spell, drink and gamble for another spell and take up with a waitress named Elaine. He is an affable hell-raiser, a Northern good ol’ boy. He keeps his energy, his spirits, his charm, by taking life at the level that pleases him and ignoring or running away from the knottier bits.

Jenny, on the other hand, sits and takes it, knots and all. She takes Sam, until she kicks him out; then she takes an emotional young priest who ends their affair after one night, by running out of Mass and disappearing when she appears the following morning at the communion rail. The episode, melodramatic and choppy, is one of several attempts by the author to inflame his ordinary lives.

Taking it turns Jenny sour. She will have a mental breakdown, recover into a state of prim crabbiness and, years later, move to California with her lawyer, who has also become her lover. Ned grows up in Mohawk, shuttling between Jenny and Sam until he goes off to college. Later, settled in New York, he will return periodically to visit his father.

While Jenny is in a mental hospital, Ned stays with Sam in a loft above the local department store. They extract merchandise through a faulty elevator door, and Ned comes and goes as he likes, eating at the local bar and grill where Sam has opened a charge account for him. It is a kind of Huck Finn stage; the boy briefly shares his father’s free and rambling existence.

It is a male existence; with the women off to one side. Sam’s long relationship with the self-reliant Elaine peters out eventually, and she marries someone else. He can make no commitments; the reward is exuberance; the price is a loneliness laced with sterility.

Even Sam’s male friendships are limited and hedged in. Mike, a barman, helps Sam out when he’s in trouble, and shows a real devotion to him. Wusser, a fishing companion, seems to want a genuine friendly intimacy. But Sam lives by the Mohawk code: Every man for himself, and a friend is someone who sits at the next bar stool and covers for you if your wife or girlfriend phones.

When he grows up, Ned moves away from the code, but he sees himself marked by it. An adolescent crush on Tria, the daughter of the richest man in town, is followed, later, by a brief affair when Ned comes back from college. Soon, though, he is neglecting Tria to hang out with Sam and his cronies.

At the end of the book, after Sam dies, the woman Ned lives with in New York gives birth. His first sight of their son is told in virtually the same phrases used to describe Ned’s own birth and Sam’s first glimpse of him. It seems to signal that the desolate man-woman cycle of estrangement could easily begin again. It is a rather contrived signal.

There are moments of evocative humor and nostalgia in “The Risk Pool.” Russo has written some powerful scenes, several of them evoking the choked, dangerous tension between Sam and Elaine’s hyped-up biker son, Drew. A sentence will flash out here and there; for example, one that describes Jenny’s penny-watching cautiousness:

“She always congratulated herself on the fact that she had nothing to worry about, and wouldn’t have; as long as she continued to worry all the time.”

Russo’s realism is impeccable. His descriptions of the depressed and restricted lives of Mohawk’s inhabitants is concrete and vivid. But the devices he uses to make them more than real; to touch them with magic, tend to fall flat. Tria never manages to become the elusive, lost princess that the author seems to intend; she is gone before you see her. Drew, the biker, fails to take on the beautiful-but-damned quality that appears to be meant for him.

And Sam, the cowboy who doesn’t ride off, becomes a bore. His allure is there but it doesn’t last. After the first several hundred pages, his unpredictability becomes entirely predictable. His gleam is caught in an oversized book that remembers it to death.