- Hardcover: 496 pages
- Publisher: Knopf; 1st Edition edition (May 8 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679432477
- ISBN-13: 978-0679432470
- Product Dimensions: 15.9 x 3.8 x 24.5 cm
- Shipping Weight: 794 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (379 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #25,664 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which 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 Robey, 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' psychological defects.
Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. 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 summarise 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 soupcon 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--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is itself sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis, Amazon.com
From Publishers Weekly
In his biggest, boldest novel yet, the much-acclaimed author of Nobody's Fool and Straight Man subjects a full cross-section of a crumbling Maine mill town to piercing, compassionate scrutiny, capturing misfits, malefactors and misguided honest citizens alike in the steady beam of his prose. Wealthy, controlling matriarch Francine Whiting lives in an incongruous Spanish-style mansion across the river from smalltown Empire Falls, dominated by a long-vacant textile mill and shirt factory, once the center of her husband's family's thriving manufacturing dominion. In his early 40s, passive good guy Miles Roby, the son of Francine's husband's long-dead mistress, seems helpless to escape his virtual enslavement as longtime proprietor of the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, the town's most popular eatery, which Francine has promised to leave him when she dies. Miles's wife, Janine, is divorcing him and has taken up with an aging health club entrepreneur. In her senior year in high school, their creative but lonely daughter, Tick, is preoccupied by her parents' foibles and harassed by the bullying son of the town's sleazy cop who, like everyone else, is a puppet of the domineering Francine. Struggling to make some sense of her life, Tick tries to befriend a boy with a history of parental abuse. To further complicate things, Miles's brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana, and their rascally, alcoholic father is a constant annoyance. Miles and David's secret plan to open a competing restaurant runs afoul of Francine just as tragedy erupts at the high school. Even the minor members of Russo's large cast are fully fleshed, and forays into the past lend the narrative an extra depth and resonance. When it comes to evoking the cherished hopes and dreams of ordinary people, Russo is unsurpassed. (May)Forecast: A 100,000-copy first printing of this impressive effort would probably fly off shelves even without the support of a 16-city author tour, national advertising and promotion, national media appearances, bookmarks, posters and a reading group guide. Returning with a flourish to familiar smalltown territory after his foray into academia with Straight Man, Russo could make a splash on big-city bestseller lists.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
THE EMPIRE GRILL was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt
THE EMPIRE GRILL was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
You'll Enjoy This Book!,
By Susan Richmond (Leavenworth, WA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)
Empire Falls only shored up my convictions that parenthood is an enterprise fraught with peril. Miles Roby, a resident of the titular Eastern town, is trying to preserve his relationship with his daughter, Tick, while he's going through a difficult divorce. Tick is mostly sympathetic to Miles, because she sees her mother, Janine, as the villain (Janine subtly announces her desire for a divorce by taking an obnoxious lover, the "Silver Fox"); since Janine has custody, Tick spends as much time as possible helping out her dad at the Empire Grill. Miles manages the Grill for Francine Whiting, the rich widow of local textile magnate C.B. Whiting, with the understanding that he will inherit the diner upon Mrs. Whiting's death. Sadly, Miles has been managing the place for twenty years now, ever since he dropped out of college to care for his terminally ill mother, and the old bag (Francine, that is) shows no signs of slowing down. All Miles wants is for Tick to grow up happy and to do better than he did, since every passing year brings the point home more painfully that Miles failed his own mother by dropping out and allowing Empire Falls to suck him back in for life. Miles' father, Max, is a classic deadbeat dad, and the cause of much unhappiness for Miles' mother; now in his seventies, Max aspires to nothing more than putting the squeeze on Miles for petty cash, and getting others to buy Max drinks. Falls closely and relentlessly (but not heartlessly) explores some of the many, many ways there are to fail as a child, a parent, and a human being, by following the generations of Robys and Whitings, and their intertwined histories, in Empire Falls.Russo's new novel represents something of a departure in tone. His previous books generally feature lovable screw-ups as protagonists: hard-luck wiseacres who accept quirks of fate with unnaturally good humor, and their occasional windfalls with bafflement. Max Roby seems to be the closest thing to a conventional Russoian (Russian?) protagonist, but he is relegated to a supporting role, and his main contribution to the book is as comic relief. Even-tempered, endlessly patient Miles earns many a sneer from his more footloose associates for having allowed his life to stagnate behind a diner's counter, and generally seems to take things far more to heart than any of the author's previous protagonists. In addition, Russo usually lends his plots a light-hearted, comic touch through his devil-may-care characters; be prepared for Falls' abrupt and scary turn toward the darker side of human failure, which jars the reader abruptly after the fun and frolicsome first half of the novel. It's nice to see that Russo is finally permitting his characters to take things seriously, although the results are a little jerky and oddly paced this time around. Nevertheless, the writing is as consistently funny and polished as any of Russo's previous books, and, if you can stomach the ending (I wasn't talking about the dangers of raising kids for no reason, you know), there's much to enjoy in Empire Falls. Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Russo, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.
4.0 out of 5 stars
More Bookish Thoughts...,
By
This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)
I always felt out of the loop for having not read Empire Falls, the Pulitzer winner of 2002 that received thunderous critical acclaim. I'm pleased to now be up to speed and to know what all the fuss is about! Having said that, Russo's book gets off to a slow start; its prologue is exceedingly dull and the first 150 pages feature unlikable characters introduced in a chaotic fashion combined with chapters of extended flashbacks. Had I not said to myself, "I know this has to get better," I would have probably given up. However, I'm certainly glad I persevered as the plot becomes engaging, the dialogue turns realistic and understatedly hilarious, and the relationships among the characters grow in complexity and tenderness. At the centre, protagonist Miles Roby remains troubled, exasperating, genuine and completely relatable. The 500 page novel deals with an impressive array of social issues from childhood hurts to economics (the title becomes literal as an Empire indeed falls) to small town mentality to the importance of following one's dreams. And the shocking, rather disturbing ending reveals both the hatred and the love of which humans are capable. Ultimately, the novel has a lot in common with the town it depicts: both are quirky, unpretentious and full of desire. After all, the omniscient narrator asks, "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?"
5.0 out of 5 stars
You'll Enjoy This Book!,
By Susan Richmond (Leavenworth, WA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)
Empire Falls only shored up my convictions that parenthood is an enterprise fraught with peril. Miles Roby, a resident of the titular Eastern town, is trying to preserve his relationship with his daughter, Tick, while he's going through a difficult divorce. Tick is mostly sympathetic to Miles, because she sees her mother, Janine, as the villain (Janine subtly announces her desire for a divorce by taking an obnoxious lover, the "Silver Fox"); since Janine has custody, Tick spends as much time as possible helping out her dad at the Empire Grill. Miles manages the Grill for Francine Whiting, the rich widow of local textile magnate C.B. Whiting, with the understanding that he will inherit the diner upon Mrs. Whiting's death. Sadly, Miles has been managing the place for twenty years now, ever since he dropped out of college to care for his terminally ill mother, and the old bag (Francine, that is) shows no signs of slowing down. All Miles wants is for Tick to grow up happy and to do better than he did, since every passing year brings the point home more painfully that Miles failed his own mother by dropping out and allowing Empire Falls to suck him back in for life. Miles' father, Max, is a classic deadbeat dad, and the cause of much unhappiness for Miles' mother; now in his seventies, Max aspires to nothing more than putting the squeeze on Miles for petty cash, and getting others to buy Max drinks. Falls closely and relentlessly (but not heartlessly) explores some of the many, many ways there are to fail as a child, a parent, and a human being, by following the generations of Robys and Whitings, and their intertwined histories, in Empire Falls.Russo's new novel represents something of a departure in tone. His previous books generally feature lovable screw-ups as protagonists: hard-luck wiseacres who accept quirks of fate with unnaturally good humor, and their occasional windfalls with bafflement. Max Roby seems to be the closest thing to a conventional Russoian (Russian?) protagonist, but he is relegated to a supporting role, and his main contribution to the book is as comic relief. Even-tempered, endlessly patient Miles earns many a sneer from his more footloose associates for having allowed his life to stagnate behind a diner's counter, and generally seems to take things far more to heart than any of the author's previous protagonists. In addition, Russo usually lends his plots a light-hearted, comic touch through his devil-may-care characters; be prepared for Falls' abrupt and scary turn toward the darker side of human failure, which jars the reader abruptly after the fun and frolicsome first half of the novel. It's nice to see that Russo is finally permitting his characters to take things seriously, although the results are a little jerky and oddly paced this time around. Nevertheless, the writing is as consistently funny and polished as any of Russo's previous books, and, if you can stomach the ending (I wasn't talking about the dangers of raising kids for no reason, you know), there's much to enjoy in Empire Falls. Pick up a copy! Another book I need to recommend -- completely unrelated to Russo, but very much on my mind since I purchased a "used" copy off Amazon is "The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition" by Richard Perez, an exceptional, highly entertaining little novel I can't stop thinking about.
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