Small (Real) Worlds
Richard Russo has been quietly building his reputation as one of
America's better novelists, not by writing the ever-elusive "Great American
Novel" but by writing novels about life in small towns filled with
characters who have real concerns and real struggles, and who are so deftly
drawn that we forget we are reading a book at all.
Reading Empire Falls, Russo's fifth novel, is like catching up with
an old friend -- it just feels good (that and you're sure to get some
good gossip). With a sprinkling of the dry humor we'd seen in Straight Man and the drama of Nobody's Fool (which was made into a movie
starring Paul Newman), Russo has written, for the most part, a balanced book
about economic, social and moral power struggles in a small town in
Maine.
After a somewhat over-lengthy prologue (which is largely a summary of
local textile tycoon C.B. Whiting's life), we enter the story nearly
twenty years after the protagonist, Miles Roby, has quit college and come
home to tend his dying mother, at the request of Whiting's widow
Francine. Grace Roby, having spent most of her life as a savant to Francine
and her daughter, who was disfigured in a car accident, goes to her
grave keeping a secret that Miles needs to discover. As the novel unfolds
we begin to see how the Whiting mother and daughter became a kind of
surrogate family that was both a blessing and a curse for her.
Though her death takes place offstage before the book starts, Grace's
life choices and decisions have had far-reaching consequences for
Miles's life. The manager of a grill that is barely making ends meet, Miles
is both enticed by the idea of buying a bookstore he cannot afford on
Martha's Vineyard and reserved about leaving town because ownership of
the grill has been promised to him in Francine's will. Meanwhile, his
younger brother David, also maimed in a car accident, keeps coming up with
food ideas that begin to attract customers from nearby college towns.
Strangely, this new prosperity is just the opposite of what Francine
wants, and this reluctance of hers begins to work on Miles's mind. His
questioning of key elements of his past, including his own boyhood trip to
Martha's Vineyard, start to unravel the true relationship Francine
Whiting has with him, layers and layers of subterfuge and deception,
magnanimity and patient malice.
Interestingly enough, the town of Empire Falls is as much a character
in this book as it is a setting. Or maybe it would be more precise to
say that the town could also be seen as a kind of attire (which is
interesting given the town's chief source of prosperity). Through sparse bits
of flashback and dialog, we piece together several decades of its
history -- from the relative prosperity of its textile-mill and
shirt-factory days to its economic decline and hints of an economic upswing. Russo
does this masterfully within the context of the lives of the people who
live there. We see key elements of the town's history as Miles sees it,
and we begin to see a parallel between his life and the town in
general. With the death of C.B. Whiting, Francine has become the wealthiest
woman in the state of Maine, wielding her power through the ownership of
property and the calling and granting of favors. We begin to see the
scope of her power, her intellect, and the depth and patience of her
motives for revenge. After her husband sucked all the wealth out of the
town, she donned it -- buildings, lives and all -- like an extravagant, if
moldering, coat.
All of this might get tiresome were it not for Russo's ability to weave
amusing subplots into the story. He does a very good job of tempering
the serious subject matter with levity. Miles Roby's ex-wife discovers
that her fiancé is not as rich as he pretends to be but wants to marry
him anyway, out of spite for her mother and Miles. Miles's father, Max,
a man with no self-conscience, talks a senile old priest into pilfering
the church coffers so they can head down to Florida. Miles agrees to
paint the church, steeple and all, even though he is afraid of heights.
Through it all, Miles seems to stand in the center of a whirling storm
of events large and small, preposterous and sad, funny and serious. It
shapes his character the way smoke fills out a beam of light.
Having said this, the book is nearly ruined near the end when a
despicable teen-age character shows up at school with a gun and shoots a
number of classmates. Not that this event is beyond the interest of
literature, but that such a horrific event is treated as a mere subplot and is
nowhere near as interesting as the themes already developed. It is
overkill, it is out of place, and it is at this point that the text starts
to veer between past and present tense and Russo loses control of the
narrative. He does grab hold of the story again, however, and manages to
pull out an ending that is strong and satisfying, despite his past
history for weak endings.
There are minor, irritating flaws, too. His grasp of technology seems
weak at best (he repeatedly refers to Miles's daughter "getting hooked
up to an email server" when he is really talking about installing
client-side software to receive email). Italicized passages are sometimes
character flashbacks and other times narrative history.
Still, this is a very good book. Russo may not be a household name, but
he is a solid mid-list author who writes novels that are fun and
interesting to read and are, at times, thought-provoking. He is neither
concerned with the large events that form our American consciousness nor
should he be. He is a good old-fashioned storyteller, and that is becoming
more and more rare in a literary world that sometimes seeks a clever
book at the expense of story.
