Empire Falls

Empire Falls, Richard Russo

Small town and small men on the verge of big things.

At once big and microscopically detailed and, yes, imperfect, but man. What a terrific read. Russo's always excellent at burrowing into the minds of all his characters, even the nastiest ones, and boring through alternating layers of brutishness and vulnerability and tenderness. He's got a real appreciation for the small indignities that make up everyday drama and tragedy. Also! He's a terrific narrator. Witty, bright, and keen-eyed, without being overly showy or exploitative.

Granted, Russo's slow boil generally comes to a bubbling baking-soda-volcano type of resolution, wrapped up in a flurry of punches in the closing three chapters, but, eh, I can't show more really complain. Any longer and it would've started to drone. Any shorter and we'd miss out on the phenomenal subtleties of character and situation that really form the pulpy heart of this book. And, thanks to that same concentration on subtlety, all of the easy resolutions feel /earned/. There've been so many smaller abuses that the victories in the end seem like a final, brief slackening of sadism, proof of a just universe. Screw realism; it's called humanism.

Like Middlemarch in Maine. show less

Love this:

Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. "Slow" works in an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower.

The whole book really captures this sense of time getting away from you, the possibility of eroding away agency over one's own life with the sense that things need to be accomplished and if only they were something would be solved. But it's the process, not the destination, that makes a life, isn't it?

What happens to small town when the only industry shutters its doors? Who are the people that stay behind and why? I'm reminded of the famous Seattle billboards from the seventies, "Will the last person to leave Seattle, please turn out the lights?"

This book won the Pulitzer and it captures what happens in America when small towns lose their livelihood to corporate and individual avarice.
Russo is a master at creating characters and motivations. I was delighted with how well he pulled themes throughout the book.

I'm creating a new bookshelf for books that perfectly capture a time and place in America and adding this book to it.

We all hear the cliché – “I couldn’t put this book down” – and we chuckle at the fact that the person couldn’t come up with anything better or different to say. Of course they could and did put the book down. Well, forgive me; I have to fall to the cliché. Every time I dived back into this book, I had trouble putting it down. No it’s not a page-turning thriller. This is a different kind of “book I couldn’t put down”. Instead, it is a well-written book with well-rounded characters and a plot that draws the reader into the lives of those well-rounded characters.

Empire Falls is the story of town in Maine that is busted. The mills have closed, and the only people hanging on are the people that just hang on. These are show more people who have known each other since high school, and they know that their kids will grow up to have known each other since high school while still staying in this same town. The story revolves around Miles Roby. Miles runs the Empire Grill which is owned by Francine Whitting, the widow of the man who owned it all. Accordingly, Mrs. Whitting still owns most of it (having sold the mill to watch it go down tubes) and rules it behind the scenes. Miles is getting divorced, has a teenage daughter, and a father that is more trouble than he is worth. Add in a soon to be ex-mother-in-law who believes in Miles more than she does her own daughter, the soon to be ex-wife’s fiancé, and the soon to be ex-wife. Mix thoroughly with a semi-psycho cop (and his semi-psycho son), a nigh-on catatonic school mate, a well meaning principal, a priest with the onset of dementia, and many more supporting cast members.

These are three-dimensional characters we care about. We know they are three-dimensional because even when we dislike a character we come to understand and tolerate some part of them, and even the ones we like have a part that we really don’t want to see. And Russo tells the story in a way that silently captures the reader. This is not showy writing (neither florid passages nor slam/dash excitement); it is quality writing that does its job without distracting the reader.

And, in case you haven’t gotten the thrust of this review, Empire Falls is an excellent book. show less

A remarkably well-written portrait of a group of people living in an economically depressed small town in Maine. This is the kind of fat, juicy, satisfying read you want when you are cooped up on a rainy weekend. You feel like you know the characters inside out and have walked a mile in their shoes. The problem? There doesn’t seem to be much of a plot (and “much of” is being kind). Oh, everything finally comes to a head, after 400 pages or so - but it feels forced and artificial – I imagined an editor yelling at the author. The epilogue explains some things very neatly (too neatly for my taste), but fails to answer the ONE QUESTION that the protagonist had been wondering about since the beginning of the book. (I said some very show more bad words when I turned the page and there was no more.) show less

Some stories, once told, become an indelible part of the landscape. That town has always been there. Those people have always lived there. Such is the case with Empire Falls, a small, dying mill town in Maine. Empire Falls is peopled with a broad cast of characters whose lives all touch each other in some way, but mainly it is the story of Miles Roby, who runs the Empire Grill, and Francine Whiting, who owns most of the town and also Miles, and how that came to be. There is so much going on here, and the story takes its time to unfold its secrets, bringing the reader on a leisurely stroll through the lives of Empire Falls's inhabitants until they become as familiar as our own neighbors. Quite often, this book is laugh-out-loud funny, show more and in a few places, it's unspeakably horrible. But mostly it's a clear-headed and largely affectionate view of small-town American life and people who are largely doing the best they can with the little they've been given to work with. This book fully absorbed me while I was reading it, and now I'm feeling melancholy that it's all over. show less

The Parable of the Prodigal Son tells of an impetuous and extravagant young man who, after running off from home and squandering his considerable inheritance, is welcomed back with open arms by his rejoicing father. Unfortunately, there is no such redemption for Miles Roby, the protagonist of Richard Russo’s affecting novel Empire Falls, whose mother Grace carefully plots for him to leave home for college as a way of escaping a dead-end existence in Empire Falls, Maine, the small, suffocating mill town in which they live. When Grace’s illness forces Miles to drop out of school and return to Empire Falls, it is very much against her will and creates a rift in their relationship that lasts until the day she dies. Twenty years later, show more Miles is indeed trapped in the same decaying environment, running a diner for the scheming town matriarch while trying to raise a precocious teenage daughter without much help from a self-absorbed ex-wife and an itinerant rogue of a father.

That may not sound like the plot of a particularly uplifting tale, but for this capable writer it provides the source material for a hilarious and deeply insightful book. As anyone who has read his work before can attest, Russo has a great affection for his characters—and there are a lot of characters worked into the 500 pages of this novel—as well as a wonderful talent for creating realistic dialogue. The story moves along at its own well-measured pace and manages to invest the reader in what happens to the people of Empire Falls without ever lapsing into a cloying sense of sentimentality. To be sure, drawing sympathetic portraits of the denizens of a down-and-out industrial city in the northeastern part of the United States is ground the author has tilled successfully in the past (e.g., The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool). Still, Russo is just so good at what he does that, for me, the stories never seem repetitive or forced. In fact, while he won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for this one, that award really could have gone to any of three or four of his other novels instead. Russo truly is among the very best novelists we have. show less