Empire Falls by Richard Russo Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Empire Falls
Book Review: A Well Crafted Tale
Summary: 5 Stars
This the first book by Richard Russo that I have read. The characters are richly drawn and very real. The book's pacing and prose are suberb. I found myself purposefully slowing down my reading in the last 100 pages, savoring the story and the characters.Book Review: A Wonderful Book
Summary: 5 Stars
On the surface the storyline is simple and compelling. It is the quality of Richard Russo's writing as it weaves subtle connections and ironies throughout the story that makes this one of the most enjoyable books I've ever read. Russo seems to have great respect for his reader, assuming intelligence and wit. In an age of high-impact cinema with special effects that spell out every turn of events in a plot; Empire Falls offers sophistication, elegance and meaning to an audience that prefers to think when they read.Book Review: A beautiful book with a forced ending
Summary: 3 Stars
Almost to the end this novel is one or Russo's best, with one of his most appealing protagonists, one of his best-drawn comic old pensioners, and a complex structure that plays in Faulknerian fashion with time within narrow confines of place. Then it all blows apart, in about thirty-five pages of conclusion that substitute cinematic 'action' and a forced relevance to recent events for the character and situation and internal development that he's best at. It left me wondering why. Perhaps to make it more palatable to Hollywood, as a previous reviewer suggested? I'm bitterly disappointed, because most of this book is even better than the Russo book I like best, The Risk Pool, and certainly more ambitious than any of his previous novels. Perhaps he should do as Fowles did in The Magus, and retool the book for a second version. In any case, he should replace the baldly sensationalist, topical ending---or simply delete it. Alas.Book Review: A book with no ending
Summary: 2 Stars
Empire Falls is a good book: interesting characters, plot set-up, location--until it gets to the end where nothing is resolved. Deus ex machina everything clears up in a sentence or two thanks to a completely throwaway subplot that seems to exist just to give Miles an excuse to leave town.Book Review: A book-lover's book to curl up with for hours
Summary: 5 Stars
Miles Roby, proprietor of the local diner, is having one of those years. His wife is leaving him for the local health club operator, a man his soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law calls "that banty little rooster." His codger of a father keeps stealing petty cash from him. His teenaged daughter, Tick...is a teenaged daughter. Meanwhile, the wealthy Mrs. Whiting-- benefactor, doyenne, and sometime nemesis--is still very much running the puppet show.
The book's claustrophobic sense of comfort, an atmosphere created by Red Sox games, local rivalries, games of gin, small town cops, and the like, is haunted by a growing sense of menace--there are an awful lot of ice picks and exacto knives lying around, feeling forboding. The small Maine town has been disappointed (the mills have long stood empty) and the people living in it waver between resignation and frustration. The latter is symbolized, for Miles, in a church steeple that seems forever out of reach. This seems to be a trope of Russo's---Tick's burdens are also made tangible in the form of her heavy backpack. Even the bombed-out mills themselves overshadow the town, just as Miles' past looms over him.
This would all be too heavy and too much if Russo weren't such a close observer of human habits and quirks. Don't let the Pulitzer Prize fool you---this book is hilarious. And while some might complain that the book has a somewhat leisurely pace, in Russo's competent hands I never minded being taken for a slight detour, confident as I was that the pieces would fall into place and, in the end, we would wind up right where we were supposed to be.