Welcome to Empire Falls: Home of Regret and Lost Ambition

Richard Russo’s Empire Falls might just replace Larry McMurtry’s Thalia, Texas as the greatest dying town in American literature.

Like the one-stoplight community in The Last Picture Show, Russo’s fictional Maine town has seen better days. The once-thriving shirt factory is now boarded up and the main hub of activity has shifted to the Empire Grill where the biggest excitement comes during the continuous pinochle game between two men who can’t seem to crawl out of their mid-life slump. The newest business to open is an athletic club owned and operated by one of those pinochle players, Walt Comeau (the self-crowned “Silver Fox”). The high school football team is struggling along, the town cop wonders if he picked the right career, the steeple of the Catholic church needs a new coat of paint and the presiding matriarch—widow of the suicidal factory owner—continues to squeeze every last penny and choke every last bit of hope from the bruised and battered residents. The blue collar has turned gray and limp.

It’s the kind of place where you’d expect to see a sign at the town limits which reads: “Welcome to Empire Falls: Home of Regret and Lost Ambition.”

Even though what I’ve described probably sounds like you’d need to chomp a handful of Prozac just to antidote the novel’s depressive effects, this is, at heart, a hopeful book, one that leaves you wishing the best for every one of its unforgettable characters (yes, even the old bag, Mrs. Whiting).

Most of Russo’s novels are set in the blue-collar universe, including Nobody’s Fool (which was made into an excellent motion picture starring Paul Newman) and Mohawk. In his most recent book, Straight Man, Russo skewered higher education.

But this time, the word-artist has turned his attention to a larger canvas. In his big new novel Empire Falls, he’s created such a painfully real place we can almost smell the despair on every page—or at least we can smell the stale grease that hangs in the air at the Empire Grill. This is a world we won’t soon be able to shake off our shoes.

Empire Falls is full of folks who sit around moping and mumbling about how they coulda been contendahs if only they’d had a ticket out. Those who did use their ticket to break out of small-town prison inevitably found themselves drawn back by circumstance and responsibility. And there they’ve stayed for the last twenty, soul-grinding years.

Presiding over most of the events in the nearly 500 pages is 42-year-old Miles Roby, manager of the grill and “the nicest, saddest man in all of Empire Falls.” As the novel opens, Miles and his teenage daughter Tick have just returned from their annual autumnal vacation to Martha’s Vineyard. Much as the sea air and upscale living revive him, Miles is soon brought back down to earth by the unchanged cares and woes of his hometown. His wife is divorcing him to marry the Silver Fox, his father is a rascal and a mooch, Mrs. Whiting’s crippled daughter is still trying to get Miles to notice her after all these years, and the events of Miles’ past are about to come up behind him and wallop him over the head with a hammer.

On the surface, Empire Falls resembles a daytime television soap opera…but with smarter writing. There’s a lot of conniving and sleeping around and dirt-dishing going on in Empire Falls. Through Russo’s omniscient eye, we get an aerial view of all the comings-and-goings and risings-and-fallings. It’s simply marvelous how Russo is able to maintain such control over a busy novel that teems with characters—each one of them indelible.

And yet, there are many paragraphs devoted to musing about sex and football and economy and love and all the other kinds of things you’d hear over a cup of coffee at 8 a.m. down at the Empire Grill. Take this one, nicely-compacted sentence, for instance:

One of the good things about small towns, Miles’s mother had always maintained, was that they accommodated just about everyone; the lame and the disfigured were all your neighbors, and seeing them every day meant that after a while you stopped noticing what made them different.

But yet, in the hands of Mr. Russo, they’re not the same. You’ll be carrying Tick, Miles, Max, Father Mark, Janine—even Mrs. Rodrigue the art teacher—around in your head for weeks after turning the last page.

It’s by no means a flawless novel—there are times when the pace is too deliberate, too languid; and Miles has a “surprise” revelation which the astute reader can see coming at least a hundred pages earlier—but it comes close, darned close to perfection.

While I’d never call Empire Falls a funny book, humor does abound on these pages. Some of it is mocking, but most of the jabs Russo takes are pulled punches. He has an affection for these characters—the centrality of Miles, the “nicest, saddest” man around, proves that.

Indeed, this is a nice, (slightly) sad novel for our modern, busy generation. Reading Empire Falls reminds us that small towns are still good places to live and work…even if you have a hard time escaping from them.