Empire Falls

Rating:
Summary: Good, not Great
Review: This is a leisurely and expansive novel, good for a rainy day or day at the beach. It tells the story of a few families in a dying industrial town in Maine. The central character is a benighted and good hearted fellow with an adolescent daughter who is easy to like and care about. Members of this family learn from their mistakes and are able to change course when certain truths are revealed. Not so the two "bad" families where the males tend to repeat the damaging ways of their forebears, in ways that hurt the good family and hurt the town. The rather simplistic division of good guys vs. bad guys keeps "Empire Falls" from being a really good book, and a surprise to me that it was a Pulitzer Prize winner.




Rating:
Summary: Warm-hearted and funny
Review: From the first page to the last, Empire Falls captivates you. Never a dull moment!
Russo draws many different characters: the funny, the loving, the confused, and the careless. Each character is a mix of these traits with different ratios.
I was especially impressed by the inspiring Miles who stays the straight course in life despite great pains and disappointments. He is a good man, a good father.
I enjoyed Russo's style of talking about his characters in the third person using the language they would use if they talked about themselves in the first person. Of course that's not new, but Russo does that quite well. James Kelman (How Late it was How Late) certainly masters this style.
What I did not quite like about Empire Falls is the rapid flurry of events and conclusions that happen in the last chapter. This stands in contrast to the easy and enjoyable pace of the rest of the book.
It is a good book. Read it!


Rating:
Summary: A book with no ending
Review: Empire Falls is a good book: interesting characters, plot set-up, location--until it gets to the end where nothing is resolved. Deus ex machina everything clears up in a sentence or two thanks to a completely throwaway subplot that seems to exist just to give Miles an excuse to leave town.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!!
Review: This was one of the best books I've ever read. It had me hooked from the very first page. I've often found that the books I like the most are those that don't necessarily have a "plot". They're simply great character studies, and that is certainly what this book is. I found myself really rooting for Miles, even though, because of his situation, the odds were against him. All of the other characters seemed genuinely real to me. There are many towns like Empire Falls where you can find people just like the characters in this book. This was my first Richard Russo book, but certainly not the last. Five stars for this one.

Rating:
Summary: Empire Falls... hard.
Review: These days, a good writer can only make a decent profit from a book if it either becomes a surprise smash hit (a rare occasion), or is made into a feature film. After Richard Russo's success with the big screen adaptation Nobody's Fool, he seemed to be struck by the movie bug. He even goes as far as to thank the director of Nobody's Fool, Robert Benton, in his acknowledgments. Now, don't get me wrong, Empire Falls would make a wonderful movie. But that is precisely what is wrong with the book. Although Russo writes elegant sentences and animates his depressing tale with just enough humor to keep the reader appealed, the book unfolds in the reader's head just like a movie. By the time I closed the book, there were credits rolling in my head to a poignant Thomas Newman soundtrack.

This time around, Russo's heroic Everyman is Miles Roby, a character so full of wasted potential that he practically begs for a break down. Calm and repressed, Miles is the manager of the local diner and is therefore the eyes and ears of the small decaying mill town in which the book takes it name. After the powerful Whiting family close down their lucrative New England mills and out source the residents's jobs to Mexico, the town falls into a virtual stasis. Here, Russo succeeds in illustrating the stagnation of a community, though he does so at the asphyxiating expense of the reader. Although Russo is masterful at describing the blue-collar life in rural Maine, he has trouble showing and not telling with back story. Truth be told, nothing really happens in Empire Falls. While Miles becomes the symbol of the hope and nostalgia that Empire Falls (both the novel and the town) still depends on, the reader is privy to the pre-9/11 fear that small town America was obsessed with. It is refreshing to be reminded of a time when emotions were not heightened by raising the national color level, but rather by school shootings, impending globalization and the rising divorce rate. Yes, it is strangely enough refreshing to be taken back just a few short years, just long enough to escape the impending future dominated by terrorism and the war in Iraq.

Empire Falls is certainly an ambitious book, covering an extremely wide breadth in a humble, almost apologetic voice. Russo introduces a gamut of stock characters with plenty of screen time for them each to shine. His cast of cliches include the endearing drunk, the troubled youngster, the vindictive ex-wife and even the Catholic preist who struggles to resolve his own sexuality. Yet, however different the characters are, they are all united by the fact that "The sad, depressing truth was that no matter who you are, you never, ever, will get your fill." Each of these ensemble members have their own problems that all manage to have deep roots in Empire Falls. Russo infuses all of their personalities with a constant internal struggle between responsibility and fate, and each character's dreams and aspirations are described with particular realism and sensitive detail. The town is a Nietzschen wet dream, a community of strong and weak wills acting on eachother in anxious, controlling ways. The culmination of this tense anticipation is problematic for Russo. He places so much on the reader's plate that he makes it impossible for all of his characters to achieve some sort of cathartic resolution. Although one does not expect an author to tie up every string of the plot, Russo allows minor characters to fall out from the pages, a simple way of easing into his grand act IV finale. The sexually unstable preist, for example, mysteriously dissapears from the plot once he is of no value to Russo. For such an accomplished author, he seems to take his secondary characters for granted.

Most compelling about the folks of Empire Falls is not their typical lives and trite soap operatic drama that Russo spins, but their tension as they wait for the other shoe to drop. The globalization and out sourcing that affects middle America, and it is heart breaking to go through their anxious waiting. Russo's tender portrayal of Miles' relationship to his daughter is by far the most moving of the novel's many relationships. In Miles' daughter, Tick, the reader is given fresh air, a promise of a bright future. As the town is in suspense about it's future, so is the reader anxious to learn more of Tick Roby's encounters. Russo illustrates Tick's ability to escape the stagnation of Empire Falls by switching his tenses from past to present. Barely perceptable to the average reader, Russo proves he is occasionally adept at the art of writing when he chooses to put effort into his story as a novel, rather than a screen play.

Tragically, today's society prefers images over words. In 2002, only 47% of the American population reading a literary work during the course of an entire year. The supply of books excessively outweighs the demand, and the literary market continues to suffer every year. The fact that a novel with the level of writing that Empire Falls lacks, actually won the Pulitzer Prize is just another sad indication of the literary empire that is crumbling. Unfortunately, writers like the award-winning Richard Russo are reaping all of the benefits. He constructs his typical Everyman novel that America is trained to enjoy reading, visioning the pop corn and the big bucks as he writes. It looks as though Russo, unlike Miles, is a man who isn't content to wait for the other shoe to drop.