| Empire Falls By Richard Russo Knopf; 483 pp.; $25.95 If the title of Richard Russo's latest novel, Empire Falls, strikes you as a possible allusion to Gibbon's treatise on the fall of the Roman empire, you've got the right idea. The notions conjured up by the title -- fallen empires, the inevitability of any human glory, no matter how magnificent and ostensibly controlled, succumbing at last to entropy -- are within the first 20 pages revealed to be accurate implications of what the reader might expect from this hulking novel. The fictional town of Empire Falls, Maine, is home to the skeletal remnant of the once-mighty Whiting clan's textile empire and those left behind, willingly or not, after the unemployment-fueled diaspora that took place when that empire collapsed. Central to this imbroglio is Miles Roby, our crestfallen protagonist and manager of the Empire Grill, who seems to be losing a slow war of attrition. But in this war, the metaphorical shrapnel embedded in Miles' body are shards of his own shattered dreams. Dreams of academia. Miles' place at the grill was both portended and pursued. While he was in high school, the girl of his dreams worked there (as she still does), so it was only natural that he be inexorably drawn to this unattainable beauty's lair. Yet when he finally escaped high school (and the vortex that his teenage desire made of the Empire Grill), his happy, hopeful days far away at an excellent college were cut short by the dreadful pull of his mother's cancer. Miles came home to comfort her, though all Grace Roby wanted was for her son to flee Empire Falls without looking back. During the slow months of his mother's demise, Miles worked long and hard back at the Empire Grill, covering for its terminally ill manager. The manager would never return. Miles would never leave. So this is where we find Miles as the novel begins. His teen daughter, Tick, is his life. He's losing Janine, his wife, to the owner of her health club, Walt. An older man who fancies himself a "Silver Fox," Walt loves visiting Miles at the Empire Grill to either rub it in or make sure there aren't any hard feelings regarding Miles and Janine's impending divorce and his part in it. Miles' right-hand man at the grill is his younger brother, David, whose burden is a self-inflicted ruined hand. David's injury is the result of a spectacular drunk-driving accident and its harrowing aftermath, the description of which itself is worth the price of the novel, but he's since cleaned up, except for the occasional toke. David and Miles' father, Max Roby, is the prototypical ne'er-do-well. During their childhood, the brothers' father could be counted on to either be sitting at a nearby bar drinking on credit or sojourning the East Coast for work incompetently painting houses. Observing all this local color from across the Knox River's Empire Falls is the probably malevolent Francine Whiting, widow of C.B. Whiting, the third generation to man the helm of the Whiting textile empire. Mrs. Whiting also happens to be the owner of the Empire Grill. It was she who fetched Miles home 20 years ago when his mother's illness took its fatal turn. Grace Roby had years before been offered a position as Mrs. Whiting's personal assistant when her job at the Whiting shirt factory was eliminated under new ownership. She accepted the position with some misgivings yet remained on until her death. It was only after the devastating blow of burying his mother that Miles buried himself in the tedium of the grill. Mrs. Whiting soon informed him that since he had kept it financially afloat for her in a tough time it would pass on to him at the time of her death. In the years since Miles took this fateful offer his dreams have been reduced to little more than making his retirement off the sale of the Empire Grill, if and when it passes on to him, and thenceforth leading a pleasurable, blas�, blue-collar existence on some spot of land on Martha's Vineyard. But capricious fate will have none of this and will make sure everything changes drastically. A little life-altering tragedy creeps in before Empire Falls ends. For a man who considers himself first and foremost a comic novelist -- and there's plenty of laughs in this book -- Richard Russo has ingeniously crafted a terribly real and at times macabre tale of lives tangled up and rent apart that spans nearly a century. But that's not to say it's a downer. The resolution, though dark, is strangely uplifting. The ambition of this work is a bit boggling, and the circuitous manner in which all the narrative elements reconnect at unforeseeable junctures with startling clarity is nigh miraculous, not to mention hair-raising. And certainly beautiful is the author's unquestionable command of voice. With characters this fully realized, you never hesitate to believe. I can recall only once or twice encountering a snippet of dialogue that came across as histrionic, but these were characters on the far periphery. Highly recommended. Make sure you also check out Russo's magnificent first novel, Mohawk, originally published in paperback by Vintage in 1986. It's now available for the first time in hardback, courtesy of Knopf. Also highly recommended. -- Jeremy Spencer |
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