Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard RussoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-04-12
ISBN: 0375726403
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Empire Falls
Book Review: Empire Falls... hard.
Summary: 2 Stars
These days, a good writer can only make a decent profit from a book if it either becomes a surprise smash hit (a rare occasion), or is made into a feature film. After Richard Russo's success with the big screen adaptation Nobody's Fool, he seemed to be struck by the movie bug. He even goes as far as to thank the director of Nobody's Fool, Robert Benton, in his acknowledgments. Now, don't get me wrong, Empire Falls would make a wonderful movie. But that is precisely what is wrong with the book. Although Russo writes elegant sentences and animates his depressing tale with just enough humor to keep the reader appealed, the book unfolds in the reader's head just like a movie. By the time I closed the book, there were credits rolling in my head to a poignant Thomas Newman soundtrack.
This time around, Russo's heroic Everyman is Miles Roby, a character so full of wasted potential that he practically begs for a break down. Calm and repressed, Miles is the manager of the local diner and is therefore the eyes and ears of the small decaying mill town in which the book takes it name. After the powerful Whiting family close down their lucrative New England mills and out source the residents's jobs to Mexico, the town falls into a virtual stasis. Here, Russo succeeds in illustrating the stagnation of a community, though he does so at the asphyxiating expense of the reader. Although Russo is masterful at describing the blue-collar life in rural Maine, he has trouble showing and not telling with back story. Truth be told, nothing really happens in Empire Falls. While Miles becomes the symbol of the hope and nostalgia that Empire Falls (both the novel and the town) still depends on, the reader is privy to the pre-9/11 fear that small town America was obsessed with. It is refreshing to be reminded of a time when emotions were not heightened by raising the national color level, but rather by school shootings, impending globalization and the rising divorce rate. Yes, it is strangely enough refreshing to be taken back just a few short years, just long enough to escape the impending future dominated by terrorism and the war in Iraq.
Empire Falls is certainly an ambitious book, covering an extremely wide breadth in a humble, almost apologetic voice. Russo introduces a gamut of stock characters with plenty of screen time for them each to shine. His cast of cliches include the endearing drunk, the troubled youngster, the vindictive ex-wife and even the Catholic preist who struggles to resolve his own sexuality. Yet, however different the characters are, they are all united by the fact that "The sad, depressing truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, will get your fill." Each of these ensemble members have their own problems that all manage to have deep roots in Empire Falls. Russo infuses all of their personalities with a constant internal struggle between responsibility and fate, and each character's dreams and aspirations are described with particular realism and sensitive detail. The town is a Nietzschen wet dream, a community of strong and weak wills acting on eachother in anxious, controlling ways. The culmination of this tense anticipation is problematic for Russo. He places so much on the reader's plate that he makes it impossible for all of his characters to achieve some sort of cathartic resolution. Although one does not expect an author to tie up every string of the plot, Russo allows minor characters to fall out from the pages, a simple way of easing into his grand act IV finale. The sexually unstable preist, for example, mysteriously dissapears from the plot once he is of no value to Russo. For such an accomplished author, he seems to take his secondary characters for granted.
Most compelling about the folks of Empire Falls is not their typical lives and trite soap operatic drama that Russo spins, but their tension as they wait for the other shoe to drop. The globalization and out sourcing that affects middle America, and it is heart breaking to go through their anxious waiting. Russo's tender portrayal of Miles' relationship to his daughter is by far the most moving of the novel's many relationships. In Miles' daughter, Tick, the reader is given fresh air, a promise of a bright future. As the town is in suspense about it's future, so is the reader anxious to learn more of Tick Roby's encounters. Russo illustrates Tick's ability to escape the stagnation of Empire Falls by switching his tenses from past to present. Barely perceptable to the average reader, Russo proves he is occasionally adept at the art of writing when he chooses to put effort into his story as a novel, rather than a screen play.
Tragically, today's society prefers images over words. In 2002, only 47% of the American population reading a literary work during the course of an entire year. The supply of books excessively outweighs the demand, and the literary market continues to suffer every year. The fact that a novel with the level of writing that Empire Falls lacks, actually won the Pulitzer Prize is just another sad indication of the literary empire that is crumbling. Unfortunately, writers like the award-winning Richard Russo are reaping all of the benefits. He constructs his typical Everyman novel that America is trained to enjoy reading, visioning the pop corn and the big bucks as he writes. It looks as though Russo, unlike Miles, is a man who isn't content to wait for the other shoe to drop.
Summary of Empire Falls
With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America?s most compelling and compassionate storytellers.Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it?s Janine, Miles? soon-to-be ex-wife, who?s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it?s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town?and seems to believe that ?everything? includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.
Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time, though, the author has widened his scope, producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece. There is, to be sure, a protagonist: fortysomething Miles Roby, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. But Russo sets in motion a large cast of secondary characters, drawn from every social stratum of his depressed New England mill town. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max (another of Russo's cantankerous layabouts), and a host of Empire Grill regulars. We're also introduced to Francine Whiting, a manipulative widow who owns half the town--and who takes a perverse pleasure in pointing out Miles's psychological defects.
Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. (At one point he alludes to his own "natural propensity for shit-eating.") And his role as Mr. Nice Guy thrusts him into all sorts of clashes with his not-so-nice contemporaries, even as the reader patiently waits for him to blow his top. It would be impossible to summarize Russo's multiple plot lines here. Suffice it to say that he touches on love and marriage, lust and loss and small-town economics, with more than a soupçon of class resentment stirred into the broth. This is, in a sense, an epic of small and large frustrations: "After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble." Yet Russo's comedic timing keeps the novel from collapsing into an orgy of breast-beating, and his dialogue alone--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis
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