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: 2005-05-10
ISBN: 0307275132
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Empire Falls
Book Review: One of the few I never finished
Summary: 1 Stars
I was looking for a good fiction novel since I mostly read non-fiction. I figured I couldn't go wrong with a Pulitzer Prize winner. I was wrong. Not only that, it eventually became a chore to read. Too many stories within a story and too many characters to develop. There was one 'storylet' about Miles as a child on vacation with his mother which I could've kept reading but it was only a few pages. The writing is good, I enjoyed his style, but the story itself didn't grab me and I couldn't make a connection with any of the characters. As much as I hate to do it, I finally (after many nights of being able to read 2 or 3 pages because it was so sleep-inducing, just called it quits halfway through the book.
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 soup?on 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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