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Overview
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.
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Synopsis
From his first novel, Mohawk, to his most recent, Straight Alan, Richard Russo has demonstrated great affinity for the tragicomic human condition, and here he expands his geographical and psychological claims on the small town, blue-collar heart of the country.
Empire Falls, Maine, has seen the inexorable failure of its logging and textile industries, the once mighty holdings of the Whiting clan, presided over by the last scion's widow, now mostly amount to decrepit real estate.
Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom front the Empire Grill, an opportunity that has become the albatross of his ambitions. Brought home from college by family obligations— his mother ailing, his father it loose cannon — Miles himself now has a divorce to contend with, but also a beloved daughter to guide gently through adolescence.
Miles also proves an excellent guide to this hardscrabble, persistent community: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and poor. Shot through with mysteries of generations and the shattering visitations of the nation at large — Empire Falls is a social novel of stunning ambition, and a master storyteller's magnum opus.
Christian Science Monitor - Ron Charles
In Empire Falls, the inhabitants seem so real that the smallest incidents are engaging, and the horrors that erupt will catch your breath. Try reminding yourself it's only a book while praying their dreams somehow break into life.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Richard Russo's most ambitious novel is also his most gracefully told. Sweeping in its social scope but also achingly personal and beautifully detailed, Empire Falls is a subtle drama about the plight of the working class in a decaying Northeast mill town.
After Gary Fisketjon edited and published Russo's powerful first novel, Mohawk, in 1986, he eagerly awaited the day he would have the opportunity to work with Russo again. He got his wish 15 years later, and Fisketjon, vice president and editor-at-large of Knopf, had this to say about it: "Empire Falls reveals our worst and best instincts and transfigures both our most appalling nightmares and our simplest hopes, with all the vision, grace, and humanity of epic storytelling."
Janet Maslin
. . . a rich, humorous, elegantly constructed novel rooted in the bedrock traditions of American fiction. [T]his is easily Russo's most seductive book thus far.— New York Times
Ron Charles
In Empire Falls, the inhabitants seem so real that the smallest incidents are engaging, and the horrors that erupt will catch your breath. Try reminding yourself it's only a book while praying their dreams somehow break into life.— Christian Science Monitor
Booklist
In a warmhearted novel of sweeping scope.... Russo follows up his rollicking academic satire, Straight Man (1997), with a return to the blue-collar melieu featured in his first three novels and once again shows an unerring sense of the rhythms of small-town life, balancing his irreverent, mocking humor with unending empathy for his characters and their foibles.From The Critics
Writer Tom Wolfe charged that "the American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia." The remedy? "Novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America in the way her moviemakers do," with "huge appetites and mighty, unslaked thirsts." For a feast of social realism, the hungry reader might turn to Richard Russo's latest work, a multigenerational epic of rich detail, memorable character and indelible plot. This is the sort of big-theme novel that complainers maintain no one is writing any more, an ambitious throwback to an era when novelists more often looked outward than inward for inspirational nourishment.In Empire Falls, which is set in a Maine town teetering toward oblivion, Russo introduces a cross section of society's also-rans; trapped between a past of minimal opportunity and a future unimaginable as anything better, characters settle for diminished returns on the dreams of their parents. The lay of this fictional land will be familiar to admirers of Russo's previous books about the blue-collar Northeast, including his 1986 debut, Mohawk, and its 1988 sequel, The Risk Pool, as well as 1993's Nobody's Fool and 1997's hilarious Straight Man.
Even if the title Empire Falls (it's also the name of the town) is a bit too dramatic or obvious, the central imagery of the river in this story finds Russo imaginatively engaging and challenging his readers. "Has it ever occurred to you that life is a river, dear boy?" the controlling heiress, responsible for the closing of both the town's mill and its factory, asks the novel's protagonist. "I suspect that's occurred to anyone who's ever seen a river, Mrs.Whiting," replies Miles Roby. In the novel's prologue, Mrs. Whiting's husband attempts the folly of changing the river's course to suit his whim. The rest of the book explores the possibility of changing the course of one's life, which is perhaps as great a folly—but maybe not, as Miles eventually dares to consider.
Miles, the book's moral compass, abandons a college education that offers a life beyond Empire Falls in order to care for his ailing mother. He comes home to run the Empire Grill for Mrs. Whiting, who has promised him ownership when she dies, though he doubts that she ever will (die, that is) or that the grill would be worth anything if she does. Paralyzed with obligation, he proceeds by numbness rather than nerve, acceding to "the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them." Miles' only hope—that his teenage daughter will not find herself trapped in Empire Falls—is marred by irony: Miles' mother vowed the same for him.
The soul of the novel lies in the relationship between Miles and his daughter, Tick, whose high school experiences provide parallels with her father's. Easily the most perceptive character (and the only one whose chapters are written in the present tense rather than the past), Tick wonders whether all adults suffer from "some sort of collective amnesia" or whether they are just "fundamentally dishonest." Russo's depiction of adolescence is particularly acute, balancing the love that the father and daughter share with the distance that separates them. And while Miles empathizes with his daughter's generation, he understands the limits to his understanding.
"My God, he couldn't help thinking, how terrible it is to be that age, to have emotions so near the surface that the slightest turbulence causes them to boil over," Miles reflects on the teenage temperament. "That, very simply, was what adulthood must be all about—acquiring the skill to bury things more deeply." Such turbulence moves from the plot's periphery to its climactic center, as parents who have failed to save themselves face the challenge of saving their children. Derided by his wife as "the human rut," Miles must accept the responsibility of salvaging his own future if there is any hope for Tick's. He finds the key to that salvation buried deep in the past, discovering the secrets of a town that he thought he'd known as well as his reflection in the mirror.
For all of its traditional pleasures, this is very much a novel of its time, building to a crescendo that calls to mind a contemporary tragedy with a terrifying immediacy. Though the conclusion is as riveting as any modern-day headline, the story's breadth over the span of decades makes it impossible to dismiss its developments as sensationalist plot twists. The narrative progression from borderline farce to bittersweet tragedy, set against the backdrop of a failing factory town, reflects an understanding of what makes seemingly drastic acts not just possible but perhaps inevitable.
Striving to sustain the interplay between the tragic and comic elements of the story, this book doesn't always sustain the graceful precision characteristic of smaller, more carefully wrought novels, ones that concern themselves with interior worlds rather than the world at large. What distinguishes Russo's work is the generosity of spirit he extends to both his characters and the reader. While some novelists satisfy their ambitions by tickling the brain, Russo feeds the hungry heart.
—Don Mcleese
(Excerpted Review)