Empire Falls by Richard Russo
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Book Reviews of Empire Falls
Book Review: Elegance in Simplicity
Summary: 5 Stars
In dire need to catch up on contemporary letters scene, I purchased Russo's rural epic of small town-Maine. Empire Falls is populated by characters you would expect to find in a town like this - underachiving dreamers like Miles Roby, ignorant hicks like James Minty, mystical moguls like Francine Whiting who seem to be pulling the strings of fate for the less fortunate, insecure but precocious girls like Miles's daughter.The seductive, cunningly written text draws the reader into ordinary lives and makes them care about the characters. To achieve this affect, Russo deployed the multi-perspectival third-person omniscient. This allows him to channel his own multi-faceted meditations through the inner voices of people of various ages, genders, and social stations. Externally, the dialogue is well-written: deadpan funny at times, absolutely touching at others.
One deep theme in the book is the passive personal perdition that gets lost in the sands of time. Things like ambition, love, and happiness are forgotten somewhere along the line when individually mild, but ultimately consequential compomises are made. Russo explores the human basics - spirituality, lust, envy, fear, anger, irrationality, failure, impotence, frustration, greed, power, hate, insecurity, et al. He is interested in what makes us who we are and memory - omniscient introspective chapters figure into the narrative between the progressing plot.
The conclusion, perhaps striving for a neorealist unreconcilability, is somewhat unwieldy considering the gargantuan effort the author put into his buildup and characterizations. Overall, however, this book stands out as proof that simple stories are richer for good writing. The mighty pen exalts the unexceptional.
Book Review: Just fantastic!
Summary: 5 Stars
I am in awe of Richard Russo. Empire Falls is a wonderful novel, brilliantly crafted and completely readable. This novel tells the story of Empire Falls, a Maine town that has seen better, much better days, and the people who inhabit it, namely Miles Roby, a middle-aged man who is not having the best of times. Both Miles and the town of Empire Falls have shown much promise, but then things change. For the town, it was the closing of the textile factories about twenty years earlier. For Miles, it was his return to the town from college, one semester short of his degree. Miles now runs the Empire Diner under the thumb of Mrs. Whiting, a wealthy old woman who apparently owns most of the town. His marriage is almost over, his ex-wife soon to marry the local health club owner. He is trying to salvage both his relationship with his teenage daughter and the restaurant he manages. The aforementioned restaurant may face financial ruin. He and all the other residents in the town try to get their life back together, trying to find that promise that they all felt their lives once held back when the mills were still working. What I first perceived as a depressing tale is actually a story full of hope with a touch of wonderful, earnest humor. Most of the characters and their relationships with each other are funny, not in the Bridget Jones, low-brow sort of way, but in an everyday, wholehearted sort of way. Miles's ex-wife, Janine, comes up with a funny, yet somehow sad, future of the lives of the Empire Falls High School football players and cheerleaders as she watches the big game from the stands that is devastatingly accurate, but funny just the same. Empire Falls is truly a fantastic novel. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended...
Book Review: A Powerful Story, Movingly Told
Summary: 5 Stars
I find myself wondering what I can add, considering there have already been more than 250 customer reviews for this book in its various editions. I'm a confirmed fan of Richard Russo's and had read all his books but this one, even including the newer collection of stories, 'The Whore's Child'; yet somehow this one had passed me by. It was only when I posted my review of the story collection that I realized I'd missed one - and a Pulitzer prize-winner at that! I wish to make only three points about this book, and about Russo; obviously there is little else I could add to the previous reviews:
1. Russo is a master plot constructor and this is very much in evidence here. All the pieces fall together and one realizes only afterwards that some odd little observations or passing comments turn out to be important to the plot. I like it when a writer can sow tiny seeds of plot that later come into full flower.
2. Russo is also a master at character description and development. I won't elaborate except to say that there are, by my quick count, at least ten characters in this book that are original, fully rounded and instantly recognizable as real and true to life. Even his minor characters - the reporter for the Empire Falls paper, for instance, or the principal of the high school - are not stereotypes. A major factor in this is Russo's great heart. He loves his characters, even the 'bad' ones.
3. Russo is a perceptive psychologist. The motivations and actions growing out of his characters' experiences and inner lives seem true, even inevitable, and I say this as a psychiatrist with almost forty years experience of listening to people's secrets.
This book will stay with you long after you've finished reading it.
Book Review: Russos Empire Falls lives and breathes
Summary: 5 Stars
It is as much a part of the story as the multitude of characters that grace the pages of this book. A decidedly drawn vision of vanishing America, along with a way of life that is being swallowed up by an economic revival that leaves out the very individuals that ushered it in. Their lack of marketable skills for the up and coming times gives them a sense of uselessness in the era to come.This story is more than the economic downfall of a town, it is the many people that incorporate its value's, meshed together they present a story that positively wraps itself around the reader and pulls them in. Miles, dedicated dad and would-be proprietor of the Empire Grill (if only Mrs. Whiting would see fit to pass), is wracked with guilt over what should have been. Though a bit late, and at the age of 42, this is his coming of age story.
He is surrounded by a cast of characters that include Tick his teenage daughter who is wise beyond her years, her mom Janine who has fallen out of love with Miles, and into the arms of "The Silver Fox", and my favorite her grandfather the Machiavellian Max, a mooch with cheese puffs in his beard.
The story takes an unexpected dark turn as the plot thickens. If you are lucky enough to listen to the book on tape there is an interview with the author where he speaks of his many sleepless nights while writing this book. As the story unfolded it became "one long night sweat" says Russo. He knew what was coming, and its intensity on a daily basis as he worked on the book grated on his sensibility.
This was a gripping piece of fiction from an author that writes not only novels but successful screenplays. He is a force to be reckoned with and an author worth watching. Kelsana 7/17/02
Book Review: A book-lover's book to curl up with for hours
Summary: 5 Stars
Miles Roby, proprietor of the local diner, is having one of those years. His wife is leaving him for the local health club operator, a man his soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law calls "that banty little rooster." His codger of a father keeps stealing petty cash from him. His teenaged daughter, Tick...is a teenaged daughter. Meanwhile, the wealthy Mrs. Whiting-- benefactor, doyenne, and sometime nemesis--is still very much running the puppet show.
The book's claustrophobic sense of comfort, an atmosphere created by Red Sox games, local rivalries, games of gin, small town cops, and the like, is haunted by a growing sense of menace--there are an awful lot of ice picks and exacto knives lying around, feeling forboding. The small Maine town has been disappointed (the mills have long stood empty) and the people living in it waver between resignation and frustration. The latter is symbolized, for Miles, in a church steeple that seems forever out of reach. This seems to be a trope of Russo's---Tick's burdens are also made tangible in the form of her heavy backpack. Even the bombed-out mills themselves overshadow the town, just as Miles' past looms over him.
This would all be too heavy and too much if Russo weren't such a close observer of human habits and quirks. Don't let the Pulitzer Prize fool you---this book is hilarious. And while some might complain that the book has a somewhat leisurely pace, in Russo's competent hands I never minded being taken for a slight detour, confident as I was that the pieces would fall into place and, in the end, we would wind up right where we were supposed to be.