Richard Russo's style reminded me at first of Richard Ford's in Independence Day and The Sportswriter, and so I was hooked from the beginning of Empire Falls. It's a sweeping, funny, heartbreaking novel that flashes from past to present as it tells the story of a once-flourishing industrial town in Maine and its quirky inhabitants who are struggling to preserve status quo. I was just looking at A. O. Scott's review, which places Russo in squarely with a slew of Northern writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, but damned if this book didn't make me think of William Faulkner first. It's been awhile since I've thought about Yoknapatawpha County or Absalom, Absalom, but some of that novel's central issues seem to be at stake in Empire Falls as well. The first similarity would be the way in which the town's past continues to inform and control the present: we as readers understand this through a series of flashbacks that become increasingly significant as the plot unfolds. Secondly, the land figures prominently in both works. Granted, the landscape is completely different, but the future of Empire Falls (and ultimately the fate of its matriarch) seems to hinge on the Knox river and the defunct mills and factories that sit on its banks. Finally, fathers and father figures are at the root of what is most troublesome (and hopeful) in these works.
What is brilliant about Russo is the way that he probes beneath the surface of this sleepy New England town. All is not exactly well in Empire Falls; businesses are dying slow deaths and the inhabitants put all their hopes in the far-fetched possibility of a millionaire buying up the factories. Still, on the surface, things are alright. Everyone is making do for the most part. However, there is a strange momentum building that readers can overlook as easily as the main character Miles Roby does.
I find it pretty interesting that A. O. Scott reviewed the book because I always think of him as a film critic. Indeed, this book was written to be filmed (the characters are wonderful), so if you don't have time to read the whole thing, I'm sure the movie would suffice - and I don't say that often. It also reminds me of that movie A History of Violence: same sort of premise. Something is brooding under the surface of things in Empire Falls, and it does explode at the very end. I was shocked by the ending, until I thought back to all the various references to violence along the way: car crashes, crippling injuries, hushed instances of domestic abuse. Even a late tackle in a high school football game and a vicious pet cat figure in to this town's history of violence. Such history, too, would connect Russo's work to Faulkner's.
I'll leave the rest to A. O. Scott. Here's the link to his review in the New York Times:
"Townies"
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