Customer Reviews for Empire Falls

Empire Falls by Richard Russo

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Book Reviews of Empire Falls

Book Review: Empire Fall is a town I fell in love with
Summary: 5 Stars

Miles Roby is a man who has lived his life in Empire Falls. He runs and pretty much owns the Empire Grill. He is going through a divorce with his wife or soon to be ex-wife Janine and he feels like nothing in his life is really real. The Empire Grill is owned by the woman who owns almost everything in Empire Falls and he feels like he can't say anything to her because he is afraid of what might happen.

He has a daughter Tick who is going through the joys of high school. She has just broken up with a popular boy named Zack Minty and is having to deal with the fact that when they broke up she lost most of her friends. So she makes friends with Candance who is a inbetween. She is popular but she wants to be, and she trys to make friends with a troubled young man John Voss who appears to be a loner with a lot of problems.

Then there is Miles father Max who is an old man who only cares about a few select things in his life. He just wants to get down to the Florida Keys. He will do anything to get there even if means stealing from Miles or hurting those close to him.

As Miles looks at his life around Empire Falls he starts to see things that he hadn't seen when he was growing up. His mother Grace is living a life of many different secrets, and Miles can't figure them out as a child and still struggles with them as a full grown man.

As this books move along you meet a lot of people who will come into the story and touch your heart. Bea, Janine's mother who is struggling to figure things out in her life. Jimmy Minty who is looking to find faults with others and point them out and at times give Miles a tough time. Father Mark who is the younger priest at St. Cats who is looking to help Miles along his life's journeys. and many more charactors who come into the story.

This was such a wonderful book. I felt when I finished it I was leaving behind a town that I had grown to love and feel part of. I am looking forward to reading more Richard Russo's books.

Book Review: accurate to small-town life
Summary: 5 Stars

Empire Falls, I cannot help but imagine, is named after the town of Glens Falls, NY, which is approximately 40 minutes from where both Mr. Russo and I grew up. Since I left for college in Philadelphia, one of the biggest cities in the U.S., and met more wealthy urban sophisticates than I could have ever met in my hometown, I started to disparage the quasi-rural, quasi-suburban town in which I was raised. But since I have been away for awhile I have since realized the virtues of smalltown life. Mr. Russo captures those virtues especially well.

Empire Falls, though, is not an optimistic book. Nor should it be. Small town life is not an optimistic life. Many of the kids I attended high school with are working low-end jobs simply trying to make ends meet while I attend an Ivy League institution. While contemporary standards of success say I am the more succesful of my friends, I can't help but doubt that this is absolutely a true statement. I may be more educated, and I may earn a higher salary at 22 than most, Russo shows that some trials of life in small towns--the simple, Shaker-like values of hard work and sacrifice--are worthwhile lessons that many urban sophisticates and suburbaners could stand to learn.

The distance and time I have spent away from my family, who still lives in the town cousin Rick grew up near, have proven that the values of "city folk" and rural people are fundamentally different. Maybe we each have something to learn from one another. I, for one, cherish my quasi-rural upbringing, and I love the perspective that living in and visiting the greatest cities in the world has given me. I think Russo captures the wonderful simplicity of small-town life, but also illustrates the depression that comes along with the crippling isolation of towns that really don't have any connection to the world of cosmopolitan glamour.

Book Review: Realist fiction at its epic best
Summary: 5 Stars

Steeped in the realist tradition of Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street," Russo's tour de force calls to mind Joyce Carol Oates (especially "Them" and "Broke Heart Blues") and the neglected Ernest Hebert (whose novels are also set in small-town New England). Like his realist predecessors, Russo masterfully renders several disparate perspectives, he flawlessly records cafe conversation and barroom banter, and he expertly creates characters who are both familiar and convincing. In addition, he so successfully distracts the reader with red-herring "secrets" (for example, Charlie Mayne, whose identity you are meant to figure out right away) that you won't expect the approaching, inevitable crescendo that provides the book's climax.

But the greatest strength of "Empire Falls" is not its plot--mesmerizing as it is--but its characters. The disillusioned and unmotivated Miles Roby serves as the center of the local goings-on and, to some extent, the town's limited social life. His adolescent daughter Tick provides Miles with his only source of hope; it's been a long time since I've read a novel that so effortlessly captures the high school experience. And I will never forget some of Empire Falls's more colorful residents: Max Roby (Miles's father), a slovenly "public nuisance" and scam artist; the town's matriarch Francine Whiting, whose intelligence and humor defy her caricature as the local witch; Walt Comeau, an annoying, aging bodybuilder who runs the area's gym; Father Tom, a senile priest who calls his longtime parishioners "peckerheads." They all are recognizable types, but Russo infuses each of them with lives of their own.

Satirical without being condescending, warm without being sentimental, authentic without being predictable "Empire Falls" captures perfectly small-town life in the modern world.

Book Review: Worth the Pulitzer
Summary: 5 Stars

Having heard about it for the last two years, winning the award and being chosen as the Today Show's book club selection, I had looked into it a year or so ago. But at that time, the description on the back just didn't catch my interest, it sounded boring. Then, my book club chose it as this month's selection and I read it. Wow...it was so much better than I'd ever imagined it. The description does not do it justice.

There's a lot going on in this book, but I'll try to give you a quick summary- Miles Roby is a man who after high school was on his way to BEING somebody, of moving past his small town and away from his dysfunctional family. He was so close, yet so far away. With about 1 year left to go before graduation and his mother on her death bed, he makes a decision that changes the rest of his life- he quits college and moves back home to take over managing the Empire Grill. Now, 15 years later, living in a town that was once bustling, but now a poverty stricken area and going through a divorce, Miles family is trying to give him the encouragement it takes to change the tides of his life and make something more of himself. It's not easy when his wifes new husband is constantly hanging out at the Grill, provoking him, his daughter is hanging out with some very questionable kids, his father is a leach, a thief, a drunk and the town loud-mouth and his boss won't give him the help he needs to turn the Grill into something better. Through a series of events that make him question his life and with family on his back about re-writing the mistakes of his past, Miles weighs his options on what to do with the rest of his life.

What I enjoyed most about this book was that it had a bit of everything. It had unrequited love, long hidden family secrets, humor and suspense. It's not just the story of Miles, it's the story of his daughter, his wife, his brother and his town. I don't think it will disappoint you, the writing is memorable and flawless.

Book Review: Humorous, Poignant, True
Summary: 5 Stars

It is the story of Miles Roby, the struggling owner of a small diner in small-town Empire Falls, Maine. His wife is divorcing him for a wealthier, more slender man. The fourteen year-old daughter he loves is going through typical teenaged travails. His ne'er do well father appears and disappears always leaving chaos in his wake. His brother is a kind-hearted, recovering alcoholic. And as time goes by he learns things about his past, and his deceased mother's connection with the very wealthy, dominant family in town that both enlighten and sadden him.

Everything in this novel works. The author is in firm control of his characters, who are richly portrayed, complex and believable. The plot crackles along and is propelled by the personalities of his characters. The prose is clear and straightforward and resonant.

What sets this novel apart from the rabble though, is the maturity--the wisdom--of the narration. This is not an angry or offended narrator, or a sarcastic or ironically detached narrator, or a narrator who holds his characters in contempt. It is instead a narrator who views his characters compassionately, but it is a compassion which never stoops to sentimentality. It is a narrator who genuinely likes them, and who views their situations through the prism of gentle humor and bemusement. Indeed, much of this is laugh-out-loud funny, but the humor is such that it allows us to laugh with his characters, not at them.

But it is a story of humans, after all, and no story about humans would be complete without the inevitable sadness and regret that loom in all of our lives. In the end, that would be the simplest way to describe this novel: it is very human. It is a superb piece of literature.