Empire Falls
May 5th, 2003by Richard Russo
ISBN: 0375726403
I got into this book: when I wasn’t reading it I was thinking about it, and I wanted to spend all the time I could reading it. This is somewhat surprising, because five years ago it probably would’ve made me too angry to read it at all. (Not that the book has been around that long; it was published in 2001.)
The Empire Falls of the title is an imaginary tiny town in Maine, but it is no less real for being imagined. The story centers on Miles Roby, who dropped out of college and returned home because his mother was dying. Miles is, at forty-two, sad, desperate, clueless, and still in Empire Falls; he is also sensitive, a good father, and smart.
There is as much history as present in the story — which fits both the narrative and the reality of small towns. One rich family, the Whitings, has always run the town, as owners of anything there worth owning. The Whiting family has had its own problems and complexities, and how their issues have affected the Roby family is a big part of this book. I’d be tempted to call the book sprawling, encompassing, as it does, three generations, more than one troubled marriage, economic decline, adolescent angst, Catholic faith, and expected yet unexepected violence in its nearly five hundred pages. But everything seems to fit too well together for that label. It is more the case that secondary characters and substories are given full room to breathe a life of their own.
In other words, it is a good novel about real people.
I’m not sure how to describe the structure, other than it felt very novel-like. Italicized chapters that tended more toward straightforward “telling” than “showing” divided the book into parts. Elements of the story weren’t always revealed in real time, but in the real time of when you needed to know about it, or when Miles discovered it — though he usually discovers things after the reader would have. I was aware that I was reading a story that was written — planned rather than something that just seemed to organically evolve — but that isn’t a bad thing. There is a confidence, a sureness in the narration that pulled me along. If it had hit a false note, I would have stopped reading, I think, but that false note never came.
Russo knows his small towns, and he knows Mainers. From the way characters talk, to the jobs they have, to the way they think, to the way they veer between feeling trapped and feeling some pride or hope for their town, he has them nailed.
He hasn’t forgotten high school either, as evidenced by his characterization of Miles’s daughter Tick. That is why I couldn’t have read this book years ago — I would have had a hard time witnessing what Tick has to bear, and I would not have had the compassion for Russo’s characters that he clearly has. I just would have seen the jerks in this story (Max Roby, Jimmy Minty and his son Zack, Walt Comeau to name the most obvious) as raving assholes without redemption, when in fact they are a bit more complicated than that, and they do provide a decent amount of humor.
A great read, highly recommended.
