Rating: 
Summary: Russo Falls
Review: I am truly shocked that this book won a Pulitzer Prize. It gives the prestigious award a bad name to be associated with such poor and heavy-handed writing. Russo's style rarely rises above that of a marginally talented high school student, complete with enough melodrama and cliches to make me wince. The title alone says it all - Gee, what is that, some kind of metaphor? Russo's writing is just BAD, it's awkward, it's predictable. Characters are always "suddenly realizing that they had known this all along." He also loves the phrase "it wouldn't occur to X until later that . . . " His characters are one dimensional and uninteresting. The big plot twist shocker is about as hard to spot as a piano falling on your head - I read the whole book hoping that there was something more, that SOMETHING more interesting would lay behind all this tripe. But alas no. If you want to read something witty, but actually clever and well written, try A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Try God of Small Things. Or Jonathan Franzen's brilliant Corrections. For just plain hilarious, Roth's Portnoy's Complaint. But Empire Falls is a waste of time and a waste of a once-respected national award.
Rating: 
Summary: A deserving winner of the Pulitzer
Review: When asked what this book was about, I was left describing a very generic storyline about the lives of severl people in a blue collar town in Maine. This book is so much more than that. I couldn't do the book any justice by trying to describe it in a sentence or two. Empire Falls is simply one of the most touching human dramas I have ever read. This book works on so many different levels, it's easy to see why it won the Pulitzer. Some of the many sub-plots include: the heartwarming story of a father's relationship with his teenage daughter and his heartfelt desire for her to have a better life; a mother experiencing a mid-life crisis and trying to recapture a youth she never experienced in the first place; a years-long, unspoken and unrequited love between co-workers; and the ever-maddening, often comic, always tragic relationship between Miles Roby and Mrs. Whiting. At times, the stories Russo relates about these characters made me laugh out loud. A truly spectacular book, one which will forever be one of my favorites of all time.
Rating: 
Summary: Nice prose and animal cruelty
Review: I started this book and couldn't put it down but I will never ever read this author again. I felt a little as if I had fallen in the river described in the story and was being carried along. The Pulitzer committee was no doubt themselves swept along by the prose - the writing is mostly wonderful - complex and layered, poetic and thoughtful - what a writer! And were it not for 'scenes' of cruelty to animals & children, I would be a fan of this author. I would be one of those readers waiting to buy and read the next book. But the animal and child cruelty is unnecessary to the story really I think - this writer is so good - as beautifully complex as the other parts of the story are - he could have found other ways (justifications, plot devices)to tell this story. The animal cruelty and the child cruelty were too easy for this author - basically a cop-out. Warning: a chained-up dog is beaten to death, a cat (who has been demonized - pleeez demonizing cats is so predictable) is ultimately stranded in a flood riding on a corpse, drug addict parents leave a child hanging on a door in a bag as a form of babysitting. Ugh. No thanks. Fan of the writing, but won't buy or read - won't spend an evening and afternoon with - this author ever again.
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.
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