Rating: 
Summary: Russo's writing engages the reader without you knowing it!
Review: Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" was a quietly engaging work that sneaks up on the reader, grabs you and won't let you out of the storyline until the final page. Page by page he introduces you to characters that can be found in small towns across America. But more importantly, he opens up the world of living in a small town and how being a third of fourth generation in the same town affects your placement there. Miles Roby and his daughter, Tick, both feel some detachment from this town, its lifestyle and especially the mis-placed values that seem live on from generation to generation. But yet their roots there also give them an appreciation for the people in Empire Falls. Having grown up in a small town myself, characters, lifestyle, relationships and attitudes rang very true to me throughout this book. Also, like Miles and Tick, I could also identify with how a small town atmosphere could have controlled and destroyed the real me, if I would have allowed that. My wonder, and hope, is whether Russo will write a sequel to this. As I felt the ending lends itself to one. All thumbs up for this fine literary work. The first, but not last, Richard Russo work I've read!
Rating:
Summary: All glowing adjectives apply
Review: To read Empire Falls is to join a small community and become intimately aquainted with it . We see what makes people tick, understand their hopes, desires and fears. Therein lies the strength of the book: to be taken so deeply into the lives of numerous characters being entertained all the way. Small mysteries unfold slowly, but the book never bogs down. The central character, Miles Roby, is as well drawn a fictional character as you'll ever come across. But Russo slights none of his Empire Falls' residents. We slowly get to know them all well. While Russo takes his time unfolding the story, we are always entertained and amused -- not to mention enlightened.
This is a story about "normal" people, about small towns and about how we are connected to our past. Good call, Pulitzer Committee.
Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful portrait of small-town America
Review: Richard Russo's style seems so appropriate for this wonderful novel about life in small-town America. Set in Maine, but reminiscent of most small towns in terms of values, relationships, and traditions, a beautiful story of family, of sacrifice, and of the bonds of love unfolds with the most touching of narrative voices. Russo's style is informal and friendly, inviting the reader to take a seat at the counter of the Empire Grill and enjoy a burger while Miles, the manager of the grill and the novel's main character, recounts his story. Russo quickly becomes your trusted friend, in that way that seems so natural in small towns, and you soon become privy to his inside jokes and his peculiar observations. His writing, in fact, reminds me of Anne Tyler, another Pulitzer Prize-winner, in its ability to make you feel as if the author were sitting right there with you. Complementing Russo's pleasant narrative style is a plot that is engaging, rich, and robust. We see Miles as he comes to grip with his pending divorce and his wife's plans to re-marry. We sympathize with his struggles to raise his teenage daughter. We observe his cordial but awkward relationship with the local police officer whose uniform, if not personal behavior, demands a certain degree of respect. And we witness Miles' slow personal awakening in his relationship with the town matriarch, who owns the Empire Grill and most everything else in town, including, it seems, Miles' own destiny. What is so beautiful about this novel is its ability to slide effortlessly between past and present, and gracefully link the two. A sense of small-town nostalgia pervades throughout the novel, offering a sense of history and community that feels completely genuine. Years from now Empire Falls may be revered as a remarkable period piece, capturing a glimpse of small-town American life in transition at the end of a century.
Rating:
Summary: Workman effort
Review: Russo's "Empire Falls" is a workmanlike composition, a book that unfolds in an unspectacular manner and whose prose gets the job done without any fancy ornamentation, yet creates a believable universe populated with interesting and complex characters. All in all, Russo spins a good yarn. But the characters are what makes "Empire Falls." Set in a New England ghost town (all too familiar to me, a New Englander born and bred), Russo's cast - Miles Roby, daughter Tick, aristocratic Mrs. Whiting, and a bevy of others - feels real, full of fatal flaws, self-doubts, anxiety, disappointment, and hope. And they're all on paths of conflict, hurtling down their character arcs like runaway trains, and Russo the master switchman who shunts them from track to track. Daughter Tick observes in the book that change happens imperceptibly over long stretches of time and culminates in sudden bursts of frenetic activity. And that exactly describes the structure of the book. Change boils up within each body like molten lava under a volcano, and explodes with a loud bang, flattening everything for miles around. But Russo is a workman, not an artist. He overwrites, adds too many flashback scenes where hints and intuition would lead us anyway. (Plus who wants to read dozens of italicized pages? It's murder on the eyes!) The last fifty pages is a clutter of half-baked plots resolutions. The prose is unremarkable, and serves only to advance plot and character. His voice is the voice of the contemporary novel, no more, no less. But as an observer of contemporary America - or at least contemporary blue-collar Maine - Russo is exquisite. He captures the spirit of abandoned mill towns across the Northeast, cataloguing their woes and optimism, creating a timely and thoughtful picture of the present. "Empire Falls" is a fine book if not extraordinary.
Rating: 
Summary: Lightweight and banal
Review: When I heard that Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" won the Pulitzer Prize and was about blue-collar life, I was expecting something a lot more serious and with a harder edge. I was disappointed to discover that it's lightweight fluff. Some of the characters and situations are not to be believed. Miles Roby, the angst-ridden main character, is defined by his relationship to the various women in his life. I just didn't care about the characters or situations. This book reminded me a lot of Richard Ford's "Independence Day," another book I didn't care for. Is this really the best fiction of the year?
Rating:
Summary: Award-winning excellence
Review: I bought this book on a whim, having never read the author but liking what I saw on the back cover and seeing that it won the Pulitzer Prize a year after another book I enjoyed (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), I decided to take a chance and was not disappointed. This story of small-town life focuses on one family struggling to get by in a company town in Maine. The company has gone away and the town is slowly diminshing; the owner of this company still reigns over the city like a queen. Miles Roby, the main character in the story, has ties to this woman that turn out to be deeper than he thinks. Miles is an amiable enough person and is in fact so easy-going he is often a pushover for the people around him. His wife is on the brink of divorcing him and his daughter has her own problems. There is a lot of humor in this story, but it is not a comic novel. Although some funny things happen, there are also some grim things. In a way, the novel reminded me of the movie "American Beauty": although the stories are not the same, the tone is similar, they both deal with a dysfunctional family, and they both show that superficial appearances can be deceiving. In fact, although I don't often like to compare books to movies, I feel that the comparison is apt here: if you enjoyed American Beauty, you will like this book as well.
Rating:
Summary: Worthy of the Pulitzer
Review: Empire Falls is an excellent novel and Pulitzer Prize winner. Centered in a declining mill town in Maine, the story centers around Miles Roby, a man, like so many people, who through circumstances and a certain degree of inertia, has never fulfilled his potential in life. Mostly from Miles' point-of-view we see the story of the town and its denizens, which is rather familiar and somewhat melancholy. The writing is brilliant. Russo has a way of writing very humorous passages about rather depressing people. His characterization is excellent and he brings to life both the history of town, the people, and his main protagonist.
Rating:
Summary: "Just beyond the factory and mill..."
Review: A few weeks ago, while looking to take a break from all the history and biography that I usually read, I went online (to Amazon.com, of course!) in search of a novel. I wanted something relatively new and of high quality... something a little different; perhaps something containing a bit of humor and an examination of our human condition. It didn't take me long to find exactly what I was looking for: "Empire Falls," a novel by Richard Russo. Published in May 2001 and winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. And, as luck would have it, a novel about Maine by a resident Maine author!! Welcome to Empire Falls, a fictional small town in the fictional county of Dexter, in the real live state of Maine. Empire Falls is very typical of the small mill towns nestled alongside Maine's great rivers - the Kennebec, the Androscoggin, and the Penobscot. At river's edge, there's a shirt factory and a textile mill, both long closed and boarded up. Most of the small businesses along Empire Falls' main street are likewise abandoned; plywood has replaced plate glass in most of the storefront windows. Meet the people who live in Empire Falls: Miles Roby, the book's protagonist... he's a really nice guy... early forties... soon to be divorced from Janine. He's the proprietor of the Empire Grill, a little "greasy spoon" that he runs on behalf of Mrs. C.B. Whiting, the owner. He hopes to inherit the eatery when Mrs. Whiting dies... Janine, Miles' "almost ex-" is trying hard to dump Miles as fast as she can. Even before the divorce is final, she's taken up with Walt Comeau, the "Silver Fox," an obnoxious sixty-year old local "swinger" who owns the town's aerobics club. Since she and Walt have become an "item," Janine has dropped fifty or so pounds, rediscovered her libido, (something she thinks Miles has lost permanently), and is addicted to fitness. Tick is Miles' and Janine's teenage daughter. Probably a borderline anorexic. Filled with teenage angst, but a source of comfort to many of her likewise angst-ridden high school friends. She lives with her mother, who she can't stand, and spends most of her free time working at the Empire Grill with Miles and her uncle David. Max Roby is Miles' "sempty"-year old father - a real deadbeat, he thinks nothing of stealing money from Father Tom, the senile retired Catholic priest, or from his own son for that matter. Max, along with Walt Comeau, is one of the great thorns in Miles' side. Overseeing this cast of characters is Mrs. C.B. Whiting, the last in the line of Whitings that settled in Empire Falls and built the textile Mill and shirt factory. Mrs. Whiting, nearing seventy years old, and as sharp as a tack, tries to rule her fiefdom with a "mailed fist inside a velvet glove..." These and many other characters form part of the fabric of Empire Falls, a tiny dot on the central Maine landscape. peaceful, bucolic little community comprised of the noble, the venal, the humble, the vain, the rich, the poor, the beggar, and the thief. A community soon to be tested by a sudden, unexpected, senseless act of violence... All of these people stumble and struggle their way toward the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams in this masterfully told story by novelist Richard Russo. Two attributes of "Empire Falls" made this book a distinct pleasure to read, from beginning to end: first, Russo writes with tremendous wit. Many of the scenes in "Empire Falls" are very funny indeed, imbued with the same kind of tragi-comic satirical wit that graced the pages of Joseph Heller's "Catch-22." The second endearing quality of this superb novel is Russo's accurate portrayal of small town life in Maine. Russo's descriptions of the town of Empire Falls - with its red brick mill buildings dominating the skyline; the old, dilapidated houses; the rusty cars meandering down Main Street; the rusty old iron bridge forming the town's lifeline with the outside world - form powerful mental images of many of the towns in which I've actually lived, worked, and played. Russo's characters bear a striking resemblance to many people with whom I've associated over the years. "Empire Falls" is definitely not an "action" novel. You're not going to be bowled over by a riveting story line, or a well defined plot filled with thrilling escapades involving heroes and villains. No, this novel is instead a book that introduces the reader to a group of ordinary people with ordinary fears, anxieties, hopes, and aspirations. You get to follow them as they struggle through their ordinary lives. MY VERDICT: "Empire Falls" is a wonderful novel... rich in detail, literate, alternately funny and tragic, and a powerful statement about small town life in America. I think it's destined to become one of the enduring novels of our generation. Read and enjoy!!
Rating:
Summary: Who else.......
Review: could write about small town, blue collar America and keep you coming back for more. The characters and their dialogue in one of a kind fantastic. I thought half way through the book that some of the storyline was becoming predictable but Russo suprises me in the end. One of the few five stars I given.
Rating:
Summary: Ugh
Review: This is a hopelessly conventional novel written in featureless prose worthy of a government document. I'm tempted to invite the members of the Pulitzer committee over to paint my house since they're clearly not suited for the job they're doing. How about something subtle and artful for next year's award -- a piece of fiction in between the bombastic lyricism of Kavalier and Clay and the thuddingly workmanlike prose of Empire Falls? This reader would celebrate the change.
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