Empire Falls

Rating:
Summary: His best yet!
Review: I've been a fan of Richard Russo since Straight Man came out in 1997, and I've waited (im)patiently for this book to be released ever since. Empire Falls is Russo on familiar ground, mining much of the same territory covered in novels like The Risk Pool-- tales of small town life in the Northeast (though in this case, Russo has moved north to Maine). His protagonist, Miles Roby, is a man who left the small Maine town of Empire Falls for the promise of a college education. He is forced to return prematurely to tend to his ill mother, and in the novel, the forty-year-old Roby is still there, flipping burgers at the Empire Grill. The book itself resounds with very familiar Russo conventions (the eccentric priest, the delinquent father, the imperious matriarch, the rational man caught in increasingly irrational situations), but in this work, Russo plumbs the depths of these characters more deeply and to greater effect than in any of his previous works. While possibly not as funny as the rest of his body of work, it is a deeper and ultimately more rewarding novel. I would highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: BUY THIS BOOK!!!
Review: NOBODY puts words together like Richard Russo...nobody makes me laugh so hard causing me to back track to re-read his genius like Richard Russo. Buy this book. Buy three of them! Give them to the people you like the most. I hope they are casting the movie...my vote is for Bruce Willis as Miles and Paul Newman as his scrappy father Max!

Rating:
Summary: Thrilled . . . again with Russo
Review: Richard Russo has the rare ability to break your heart and make you laugh, all on the same page. He proves this again in Empire Falls. However, where Russo's earlier novels are often playful and ironic, his newest is as ambitious a novel as I've read in a while. Its many levels go beyond normal character development and could be classified as "character intimacy." By the last page you know everyone so well that you get the feeling they will continue to live on and on, even when the novel is placed safely on your bookshelf. It's not as quick a read as Straight Man . . . and it's not as uplifting as Nobody's Fool . . . but Empire Falls is a gripping, emotinally draining book that any fan of literature should read.

Rating:
Summary: If I could write, I'd like to write like this guy
Review: What I've always liked best about Richard Russo's characters is that they are spectators. Watching and noting the things that happen to them as if they are helpless to change. And then they find some small thing the absolute last tolerable occurrence, and begin to affect a change.

One of my friends dislikes Russo's characters, because, as he put it, "they never do anything!" But they do, it's just that they are wainting to choose just the right thing to do.

I loved Empire Falls because of Miles Roby. Another good guy who is getting stepped all over (like most of the people I know) and who manages to not be such a simpleton that he doesn't notice. I could identify with the various crosses he has to bear - Walt the jerk who is engaged to his ex-wife, the bully Jimmy and the worry about Jimmy's son who wants Miles' daughter Tick. I love the shallowness of some of the characters, because, well, I know that there are lots of shallow people out there. They are so desperate that it makes me like them anyway.

I work in a small town and there are so many aspects that Russo has captured so well. I've been so fond of all his books, and this is one I know I will return to (ok, maybe not so often as the 5 or 6 times I've read Straight Man...but then again, who knows?)

Rating:
Summary: Richard Russo, "Empire Falls"
Review: Despite its portentously "symbolic" title (hmm, an empire is falling...?), the most refreshing and admirable quality of Richard Russo's new novel is its seductive specificity. In portraying members of several generations and social classes in the town of Empire Falls, Maine, Russo never presents a detail that isn't rooted in real life, nor a character who gives off a whiff of anything remotely allegorical. And though the plot touches on several topical issues--childhood trauma, small-town economic decline, and schoolyard violence, among others--it never uses them as subjects for polemic. Each one connects with your emotions directly, through the lives of the characters it affects.

"Empire Falls" is engaging on many levels. The plot is gripping, the dialogue realistic (and frequently hilarious), and the friendships and enmities among characters unfailingly tender even when bordering on the tragic. Much of this tenderness can be attributed to the character of Miles Roby, the novel's protagonist. Literary kin to John Updike's Harry Angstrom and Richard Ford's Frank Bascombe, decent but confused American Everymen, Miles comes across as a complex, occasionally exasperating, but never less than sympathetic figure.

The novel's structure feels a bit unwieldy at first: a number of interspersed chapters are each made up of an extended flashback set completely in italic type. But the reason for this grows clearer as the book progresses, until toward the end the interruptions become as crucial to the novel's development as the events of the main story line. There were times during my reading of "Empire Falls" that I felt I was holding in my hands not just a certain candidate for all of next year's literary awards but a possible future American classic. It reawakened every fond feeling I've had about contemporary U.S. fiction. It also, miraculously, seems to encapsulate in its 500 pages everything good about American novels since the middle of the last century.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I liked Straight Man a lot, thought Nobody's Fool was wonderful, and thought that Risk Pool was one of the best books I have read, so I was very excited that Russo had a new book coming out. I even took pleasure in ordering it in advance. Unfortunately for me I didn't like Empire Falls very much. I found Miles Roby sanctimonious. His pretext for staying in Empire Falls (his love for a waitress) seemed pretextual which maybe it was supposed to be, but what was it a pretext for: his love of small town life or being a big fish in a small pond, better than everyone else in town, santimonious? I also thought there was quite a bit of foreshadowing that went no where (e.g. the repeated suggestions that Ms. Whiting had an agenda with respect to Miles). I also wasn't wild about some of the other characters (like Tick who was a little too wise). Of course, there was a lot to like. The philosophical musings of the characters and the descriptions of Empire Falls were good enough to make it worth reading, but definetely not a winner.

Rating:
Summary: Long live Empire Falls!
Review: Empire Falls, Maine is a cross-section of our own foibles and failures, graces and gallant gestures. From Miles "Mr. Nice Guy" Roby's struggle to build a better life for his daughter while valiantly facing his own defeats to Mrs. Whiting's machinations and manipulations of the town and it's residents, Russo has created a novel of infinite depth and panoramic scope. Anyone hailing from a depressed area of the country will recognize the laughable and likable characters who populate Russo's very funny, very real and often scary portrait of small-town America.

Rating:
Summary: A Truly Remarkable Novel
Review: I don't think it would be a stretch to say that Empire Falls will be one of the best novels you will have read in recent times. Everyday people struggling to survive in the decaying town of Empire Falls may not make the most promising beginning of a storyline. But author Richard Russo's remarkable writing makes the story and the characters so alive and so endearing in the midst of tragedy and despair that the book simply sparkles.

Miles Roby, proprietor of the local diner, is the central character around whom all of the secondary characters revolve around. His cynical teenage daughter, his confused ex-wife, his colorful father, his high school friends who have all settled into various jobs in Empire Falls, et al. These are all people we have met and known in real life. People who started out with high ambitions only to find themselves ultimately back home continuing the legacies of their parents. But this book is not a downer. It's Russo's witticism that brings that special degree of levity, sensitivity and warmth to all those people, passages and conversations that makes the novel so alive and so great.

This is the one. This is the book that once you've finished reading you will want to tell everyone else to read. Don't miss Empire Falls.

Rating:
Summary: Just fantastic!
Review: I am in awe of Richard Russo. Empire Falls is a wonderful novel, brilliantly crafted and completely readable. This novel tells the story of Empire Falls, a Maine town that has seen better, much better days, and the people who inhabit it, namely Miles Roby, a middle-aged man who is not having the best of times. Both Miles and the town of Empire Falls have shown much promise, but then things change. For the town, it was the closing of the textile factories about twenty years earlier. For Miles, it was his return to the town from college, one semester short of his degree. Miles now runs the Empire Diner under the thumb of Mrs. Whiting, a wealthy old woman who apparently owns most of the town. His marriage is almost over, his ex-wife soon to marry the local health club owner. He is trying to salvage both his relationship with his teenage daughter and the restaurant he manages. The aforementioned restaurant may face financial ruin. He and all the other residents in the town try to get their life back together, trying to find that promise that they all felt their lives once held back when the mills were still working.

What I first perceived as a depressing tale is actually a story full of hope with a touch of wonderful, earnest humor. Most of the characters and their relationships with each other are funny, not in the Bridget Jones, low-brow sort of way, but in an everyday, wholehearted sort of way. Miles's ex-wife, Janine, comes up with a funny, yet somehow sad, future of the lives of the Empire Falls High School football players and cheerleaders as she watches the big game from the stands that is devastatingly accurate, but funny just the same. Empire Falls is truly a fantastic novel. I couldn't put it down. Highly recommended...

Rating:
Summary: walking up subway stairs with this book in my nose
Review: I rarely like fiction, but I could not put this book down. Russo's understanding and observations of human nature are subtle but genius. He captures the nuances of mundane life with the shrug of a poet. Things we think but don't say, how we feel but can't express. Since I read this book, nothing has compared, and I have had to read more of Russo's work to compensate for the loss I feel at having finished this book. His other work is just as good, especially the short story "Joy Ride" in "The Whore's Child and Other Stories." From a non-fiction reader who is wary of any novel, take my advice and read this book. Unbelievably believable.