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Empire Fallsby 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.
From 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
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Disappointing, to Say the Least -  |
Empire Falls Review |
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Russo easily manages the difficult task of creating a town and populating it with "real" people, but he does the narrative a tremendous disservice with a major rote story line. The introduction of an abused teenager who goes on to kill a classmate, a teacher and the principal betrays the novel. Not only does it reflect a lack of imagination, but it fails to move the characters along the natural line of progression Russo had outlined until that point. If deus ex machina is your thing, you may not find this twist disruptive. I would have preferred the characters to find redemption or falter just short of it through their own actions rather than find the 460+ pages that preceded this shift were read in vain.
Note: Russo needed a mechanism to get his protagonist Miles to Martha's Vineyard so that he could he could have his epiphany. I suppose a psychopathic teenager is an easy way to create that path, but that isn't the one I expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Two stars given only because of the quality of the writing and the depth of exploration of the relationships we have with ourselves, our family and friends, the towns in which we live and, critically, expectations -- those we have for ourselves and that others have for us. |
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Thoughtful -  |
Empire Falls Review |
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On the surface this is a book about an average guy who is stuck in a rut in an average small town. But when you delve deeper, you see that the book is about how pivotal choices and events shape who we are and where we end up in life. The characters in this book are memorable, realistic, and well developed. They are masterfully woven together to create an engaging story. However, the story moves slowly because there are a lot of necessary details to the story. I would not recommend this book to anyone looking for a quick, entertaining read that requires no thought. Much like real life, some parts of the story were humorous while others were tragic and sad. |
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Readable -  |
Empire Falls Review |
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Life in a derelict New England milltown. Readable? Yes, but not mesmerizing. Hard to argue with the Pulitzer Prize, but, frankly, the characters were weak-kneed and not particularly likeable; kept hoping someone would show a little spunk but it didn't happen. |
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Mostly a bored...with a little wisdom here and there - |
Empire Falls Review |
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Reviewing this novel almost requires two rating systems-one for how much one enjoys this book, and one for the book itself. I give a 2/10 for the first, and a 7/10 for the second. From a casual reader's perspective, the 483-page textblock was a pain to read. I found myself losing focus multiple times during readings and by the time I finished I felt like I had just ran a marathon-one that I was forced to participate in. The main character Miles was one of the most aggravating characters I have ever met in fiction. Ironically, the character I sympathized most with was the one portrayed as the greatest villain in the story. I'm not sure whether that was the exact effect Mr. Russo was going for...
That being said, there were random bursts of humor here and there that made me literally laugh out loud. The dramatic/tragic ending did make me contemplate for about five minutes after I put down the book, but then I preceded to carry out the other mundane tasks of everyday life wjth little memory of what I had just read. |
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One of the few I never finished -  |
Empire Falls Review |
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I was looking for a good fiction novel since I mostly read non-fiction. I figured I couldn't go wrong with a Pulitzer Prize winner. I was wrong. Not only that, it eventually became a chore to read. Too many stories within a story and too many characters to develop. There was one 'storylet' about Miles as a child on vacation with his mother which I could've kept reading but it was only a few pages. The writing is good, I enjoyed his style, but the story itself didn't grab me and I couldn't make a connection with any of the characters. As much as I hate to do it, I finally (after many nights of being able to read 2 or 3 pages because it was so sleep-inducing, just called it quits halfway through the book. |
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