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Empire Falls

by: Richard Russo

: Empire Falls
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780375726408
ISBN: 0375726403
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 496
Publication Date: April 12, 2002
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: April 12, 2002
Sales Rank: 14217
Studio: Vintage



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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
With Empire Falls Richard Russo cements his reputation as one of America’s most compelling and compassionate storytellers.

Miles Roby has been slinging burgers at the Empire Grill for 20 years, a job that cost him his college education and much of his self-respect. What keeps him there? It could be his bright, sensitive daughter Tick, who needs all his help surviving the local high school. Or maybe it’s Janine, Miles’ soon-to-be ex-wife, who’s taken up with a noxiously vain health-club proprietor. Or perhaps it’s the imperious Francine Whiting, who owns everything in town–and seems to believe that “everything” includes Miles himself. In Empire Falls Richard Russo delves deep into the blue-collar heart of America in a work that overflows with hilarity, heartache, and grace.

Amazon.com Review:
Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which itself 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 Roby, 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's psychological defects.

Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. (At one point he alludes to his own 'natural propensity for shit-eating.') 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 summarize 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 soupçon 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 alone--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis



Customer Reviews
Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Good, captivating read.
Richard Russo's Empire Falls was an engrossing, if not enjoyable read.

Part of my interest ... Read More


Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Disappointed in this book.
I was so looking forward to reading a Richard Russo book. I had heard great things about him from friends ... Read More


Rating: 2 out of 5 stars - Disappointing, to Say the Least
Russo easily manages the difficult task of creating a town and populating it with "real" people, but he does ... Read More


Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Thoughtful
On the surface this is a book about an average guy who is stuck in a rut in an average small town. But when ... Read More


Rating: 3 out of 5 stars - Readable
Life in a derelict New England milltown. Readable? Yes, but not mesmerizing. Hard to argue with the Pulitzer ... Read More

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Copyright ©2003, Mark Carey.