Richard Russo, Empire Falls

In the first chapter of Richard Russo’s wise, often hilarious, and utterly satisfying new novel, a character reports that in some parts of California—Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Malibu—physical ugliness has been almost entirely eradicated: Everyone there is slender, tan, and beautiful.

Not so in Empire Falls, Maine. Like the fictional upstate New York towns of Mohawk and North Bath of Russo’s earlier novels, Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody’s Fool, like the real Gloversville, where Russo grew up, Empire Falls (the town and the novel) is, thank goodness, inhabited by the decidedly and memorably imperfect. They are variously wounded and warped, crippled and demented, scratched and scarred.

These are Russo’s people. After Straight Man, his brilliantly funny academic, mid-life crisis novel, he’s returned to the grubby, blue-collar, small-town world. One character has an unnervingly large, purple veined fibroid cyst on his forehead. Another has an arm permanently damaged in a drunken wreck that left him dangling from a tree. Still another, crippled as a child physically and psychologically in a mysterious accident, is held together delicately by surgical pins and unlikely romantic dreams. 

One of Russo’s great creations is a 70-year-old house painter named Max Roby, a kind of older, more shiftless spiritual cousin to Sully, the incorrigible hero of Nobody’s Fool, played so well—if too handsomely—by Paul Newman in Robert Benson’s film. Max is a man with a two-word personal philosophy—so what?—and appalling personal habits: Half his teeth are missing, half are loose, and he’s got crumbs perpetually in his beard. The kind of man who’s not above lifting $20 from his own son’s pocket, Max absconds to Key West at one point with a senile priest and the Sunday collection envelopes in the parish Crown Victoria only to turn up weeks later, broke again, the winner of a Hemingway look-alike competition.

Russo presents these people without condescension, not as grotesques, in much the same way Max’s granddaughter tells him, “You’ve got food in your beard, Grandpa”—truthfully enough, but affectionately. Russo understands that even a good heart, being human, is “fragile, imperfect, and destined to fail.” With the keen eye and deft touch of a master portraitist, he renders them in all their vivid imperfection, cysts and all, their stubborn flaws, their pungent humanity. 

At the center of the novel is Max’s son, Miles Roby, the nicest, saddest man in all of Empire Falls. Once a booming mill town that enriched three generations of the Whiting family, Empire Falls is dying now, the mill and shirt factory closed, the good jobs all gone South. Having dropped out of college and returned to Empire Falls against his dying mother’s wishes to be with her in her last illness, Miles has for 20 years been running the Empire Grill, which the elderly widow Frances Whiting, who owns most of the town, has promised to bequeath him upon her death. 

Miles is a good but passive man. His wife has left him for Walt Comeau, a fitness club owner, a man who styles himself the Silver Fox, who serenades diners in the Grill with Perry Como tunes, and offers Miles—he calls him Big Boy—suggestions for improving his business. Miles talks theology with his friend Father Mark, works at painting the church and contemplates the steeple he is too frightened to climb; he crosses the Iron Bridge to endure his unsettling annual state-of-the-grill meetings with ruthless Mrs. Whiting, and worries about his teenaged daughter Tick, smart and artistic, struggling under the burden of her massive backpack and considerable weight of adolescent confusion. During the course of the novel, a carefully orchestrated series of crises rouses Miles at last from his spiritual coma and forces him to confront his past and to make a future. 

Empire Falls is a fat, old-fashioned, multilayered novel in the tradition of Dickens. There’s low comedy and high drama. The book is stuffed full with sub-plots and memorable minor characters, each of them fiercely, intensely alive. (It is some measure of Russo’s genius that Timmy, Frances Whiting’s demonically vicious female black cat, is more richly characterized than a good many supposedly human protagonists you’ll find in other contemporary novels.)

The dialogue sparkles—no one does insult and wisecrack better, no one has a better ear for greasy-spoon argument and philosophy, the everyday performance art of conversation. The book illuminates the texture of particular lives in a particular place with absolute authority and clarity—Russo knows exactly how to unclog the jets of a balky ancient commercial dishwasher; he understands the subtle art and precise timing employed by a freeloader like Max Roby to bum cigarettes and drinks at a local tavern.

Russo also knows all about the arts of self-deception, the depths of human longing and cruelty, our capacity for violence and for generosity. Empire Falls artfully combines the public and the private; it is the story of individual lives, and the story of a town, a quintessentially American story of the late 20th century. It is a profound and knowing exploration of the nature of community, our connectedness, those of us on both sides of the bridge, rich and poor, high and low, the complex forces that bind us together—love and guilt, grudge and obligation, accident and inertia. 

When Richard Russo spoke to Canisius writing students two years ago about the novelist’s temperament, that blend of almost pathological patience and arrogance, he described himself as an athlete and as a writer, not as a sprinter but as a long-distance man, a cross-country runner.

That four years after disappearing into the woods one of our best novelists has emerged again with this wonderful new book is a cause to cheer. 

—The Buffalo News