In Empire Falls, Richard Russo offers a
vivid portrait of a small, New England town that has slowly succumbed to
poverty since the closure of its textile mill and clothing factory several decades
before the novel’s beginning. The town’s population has slowly slipped away to
more prosperous townships and cities, leaving most of the town’s property in
the hands of Mrs. Whiting, the widow of C. B. Whiting, the last of the Whiting
dynasty’s male line. Mrs. Whiting lives alone in her hacienda by the river, on the
other side of the “iron bridge” from the town—except for the times when her
crippled and mentally unstable daughter Cindy, comes to visit. She is an old,
but active and vivacious woman, who possesses a keen ability to read human
character and understand the motivations of her interlocutors, so that she can
more easily manipulate them.
Russo’s
novel follows Miles Roby, the proprietor of the Empire Grill, in the months the
months leading up to his impending divorce. Miles has just returned from his
vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, where he and his teenaged daughter, Tick, stayed
with Miles’s college friends, who own on a summer home on the island. It is an
annual visit that always raises, for Miles, visions of what could have been, if
his mother had not fallen ill and he had not put his studies on hold to return
to Empire Falls, where he subsequently fell under Mrs. Whiting’s thumb, as
manager of her Empire Grill.
Miles
is a man of deep loyalties, who trusts others easily and readily, and is sure
that Mrs. Whiting will honor her promise to leave the Empire Grill to him after
her death,—an event that, given the woman’s good health, is still many years
off—despite all evidence suggesting that Mrs. Whiting only keeps the promises
that suit her. Small-town life is not an existence that Miles relishes, and
it’s not a life to which he wants his daughter to succumb. He tires of the
demons from his past, the living men and women who walked beside him in his
youth, and continue to harass and haunt him in adulthood. He dreams of
inheriting the Empire Grill so that he can sell it, and use the money to help
his daughter escape the life that he could not escape.
Slowly,
and with his brother’s urging, Miles begins to take some initiatives. Together,
they make the Empire Grill profitable again, though they know that the Grill’s
profits can never be optimized without Mrs. Whiting’s help, which she seems
unwilling to give. As Miles works to change his future, visions of his past
become interspersed with the novel’s narrative, revealing more about Miles and
his family’s past, as well as the town’s past. The relationship between the
Robys and the Whitings, between employees and employers is also more fully
revealed, and the cyclical nature of Miles’s predicament, a cycle that he is
trying to break, is more fully understood.
Russo
tells a story rich with detail and imbued with true to life characters. The
writing is lucid and the story is intriguing. Emotion, hope, fear, ambition,
love, compassion, cruelty, hate, pettiness, and vengeance all come together in
the novel through characters who are, for the most part, just behaving as
readers can expect them to behave. Russo is true to his characters, and true to
the ambiguity of humanity: good people have faults, and bad people also have
virtues. Empire Falls steadily builds
toward its climax, using small details as large stepping stones to create, out
of this perceptive investigation into the human character, a heart-pounding
climax that concludes with a heart-touching denouement. This was my first Russo
novel, and I’m definitely interested in reading another one soon.
JCM
1 September 2013
