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Empire Falls, by Richard Russo
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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.
- Sales Rank: #21094 in Books
- Color: Multicolor
- Brand: Vintage
- Published on: 2002-04-12
- Released on: 2002-04-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.00" h x 1.00" w x 5.10" l,
- Binding: Paperback
- 483 pages
- Great product!
Amazon.com Review
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 soupçon 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
From Publishers Weekly
In his biggest, boldest novel yet, the much-acclaimed author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man subjects a full cross-section of a crumbling Maine mill town to piercing, compassionate scrutiny, capturing misfits, malefactors and misguided honest citizens alike in the steady beam of his prose. Wealthy, controlling matriarch Francine Whiting lives in an incongruous Spanish-style mansion across the river from smalltown Empire Falls, dominated by a long-vacant textile mill and shirt factory, once the center of her husband's family's thriving manufacturing dominion. In his early 40s, passive good guy Miles Roby, the son of Francine's husband's long-dead mistress, seems helpless to escape his virtual enslavement as longtime proprietor of the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, the town's most popular eatery, which Francine has promised to leave him when she dies. Miles's wife, Janine, is divorcing him and has taken up with an aging health club entrepreneur. In her senior year in high school, their creative but lonely daughter, Tick, is preoccupied by her parents' foibles and harassed by the bullying son of the town's sleazy cop who, like everyone else, is a puppet of the domineering Francine. Struggling to make some sense of her life, Tick tries to befriend a boy with a history of parental abuse. To further complicate things, Miles's brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana, and their rascally, alcoholic father is a constant annoyance. Miles and David's secret plan to open a competing restaurant runs afoul of Francine just as tragedy erupts at the high school. Even the minor members of Russo's large cast are fully fleshed, and forays into the past lend the narrative an extra depth and resonance. When it comes to evoking the cherished hopes and dreams of ordinary people, Russo is unsurpassed. (May)Forecast: A 100,000-copy first printing of this impressive effort would probably fly off shelves even without the support of a 16-city author tour, national advertising and promotion, national media appearances, bookmarks, posters and a reading group guide. Returning with a flourish to familiar smalltown territory after his foray into academia with Straight Man, Russo could make a splash on big-city bestseller lists.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"Elijah Whiting...had not succeeded in killing his wife with a shovel, nor had he recovered from the disappointment." These lines from the prolog of Russo's (Straight Man) latest novel prove prototypical. A keen observer of human nature, Russo explores the tragicomic realities of life in a small mill town in central Maine whose best days are behind. Miles Roby is a basically decent guy who runs the Empire Grill for the widow of the last Whiting male (who shot himself when he, too, couldn't recover from his failure to dispatch his wife). Miles's own wife has left him for a sleazy gym owner, and his angst-ridden teenage daughter has befriended a sullen, ominously silent classmate shunned by the rest of his peers. Meanwhile, his ne'er-do-well father is in the process of trying to con a senile old priest into financing his annual jaunt to Key West. As the world careens around him and his fellow townfolk, Miles is trying desperately to figure out what went wrong and the answers, both complicated and simple, seem to lie mostly in the house across the river in which Mrs. Whiting resides. Russo has constructed a sensitive, endearingly oddball portrait of small-town life, a wonderful story that should appeal to a wide audience. Especially appropriate for public and larger academic libraries.
- David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, FL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
An Enjoyable Reading Experience In A Modern Popular Style
By FCD117
In this work of fiction, Empire Falls is the name of a community. The story revolves around the lives of several persons in this small town. The book is an easy read. There is a lot of humor that I found genuinely funny. The scenes keep changing in time, place, and characters.
I enjoyed this novel, but really it did not seem to be going anywhere for about the first half of the book. However, the author was building the foundation for the rest of the story and it ended up working well, and for me, was a "page turner" at the end.
This book was a book club selection that I had never heard of. I am glad I read it and am grateful to my book club for introducing me to this book. It is a good book, and mostly a fun read. In truth, it is not the kind of book I would read twice. But I did enjoy it. Thank You...
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Loaded with characters!
By Dave Schwinghammer
Generally, I prefer character-driven stories to plot-based, but there is such a thing as too much of a good thing. Richard Russo illustrates this in EMPIRE FALLS. Ostensibly it's about the trials and travails of Miles Roby, a restaurant manager, who's worried that the town dowager, Francine Whitney, will go back on her promise to leave him the restaurant when she dies. Empire Falls is a dying mill town and Francine owns everything including most of the people.
Things get complicated when we discover that Miles's mother had an affair with Francine's husband, the owner of the defunct mills, and that she's taking it out on him.
Miles also has a daughter named Tick, the epitome of teenaged angst, who is having difficulty dealing with her father's impending divorce. Then there's Miles's younger brother David, who may or may not be the dead mill owner's son; Miles's reprobate of a father, Max, who steals from his son every chance he gets; a gay priest, who functions as Miles's confidant; a town cop with a low self image; Janine, Miles's soon-to-be ex and former fat person; and Janine's fiancé, Walt Comeau, a gym owner who is constantly challenging Miles to arm-wrestle.
Most of these characters are given their own viewpoint and there lies the problem. Russo gets inside their heads and stays there for pages at a time, telling us what they're thinking, and just when we get interested in one of them, he switches perspectives. The pace is glacial. It took me over two weeks to read the thing.
That said, EMPIRE FALLS can be hilarious at times. For instance, Tick's art teacher teaches a low-level class that she divides into different colored tables. When the blue table acts up, she says, "Why can't you people act more like the green table?" Two of the students at the green table are absent; one is asleep, and another is studying algebra. As a former teacher, I can really relate. Then there's Miles's father Max. He's a hoot. At one point he decides he wants to go to the Florida Keys, but he has no money, so he cons the senile parish priest into stealing money from the collection box.
There is a violent climax that I have to admit I did not see coming, although Russo practically tells the reader what's going to happen. If you have the time and patience, Empire Falls may be a good one to dip into.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Puppet Life
By John Van Wagner
Pity the poor denizens of Empire Falls. Consigned to paralyzed existences, they struggle like flies on paper for some kind of end to the drudgery of menial jobs, empty marriages, and overdue bills. If there's nobility in their treadmill exertions, it never shines through. The only relief for the pitiable characters in Richard Russo's epic portrayal of life and death in a dying factory town lies in drink, memory, and the vain hope of escape to anywhere else.
Like most of his compatriots in "Empire Falls," Miles Roby was born to his lot. But unlike them, someone dreamed for him. His mother Grace, a beautiful vision of his youth, stood guard over him like an angel, toiling in a factory and an abusive marriage, all to ensure that her beloved Miles realized the station in the world that his mind and soul deserved. But what neither Grace, nor Miles, nor anyone in Empire Falls could realize, was that their lives and futures were already decided, because they were owned by a force they couldn't comprehend or fight, but only fear.
Francine Whiting is a villainess right out of TS Eliot or Ken Kesey, a cunning and ruthless virago with an insatiable appetite for control. Having long ago married into Empire Falls' founding family, and emerged through widowhood and shrewd manipulation into literal ownership of the town, she plays with her feeble-willed subjects like a cruel puppeteer, offering up empty hopes and false promises for better lives, all the while sucking the last vestiges of value from the dying town.
Armed with two strong and warring main characters, Francine and Miles, Russo weaves a tale of compelling mysteries and betrayals, augmented by a style of writing that evokes pain and nobility in plain spoken but elegant prose. Like eddies in the town's polluted main river, sub-plots swirl and dissipate, sucked into the main whirlpool of the titanic struggle among Francine, Miles, and those in their orbit to rationalize and conquer the secrets of the past.
Russo has firm control of his story. His skills as a writer prevent the sometimes pulpy material from descending into outright soap opera. He uses the clever Dickensian tool of leading the reader into the lives of the poor through the eyes of the rich, and proceeds to offer up a compelling, though often frustrating and depressing, tale of struggle and salvation,
culminating in the hard-- won but tentative triumph of the human spirit. He style is that of the old-fashioned novelist--no abstractions or experimentations here--but his use of a conventional literary construction still has the stamp of originality and significance. The worst that can be said of it can be said of the work is that it's about sad people, and is best read during a contemplative afternoon alone on a rainy, dreary day.
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