EMPIRE FALLS
By Richard Russo
There is no insult intended when I say Empire Falls reminds me a lot of
Stephen King. The simply constructed, suspenseful plot that never lets go of
your hand, the small town New England setting, the unwavering conventional
morality, easy cultural references, and telegenic
adolescents ("telegenic" because made in television's image) all recall
America's master of pulp horror. Nor is Russo's book without a few monsters and
ghosts of its own.
Local police officer Jimmy Minty is a violent brute. A disturbed teen turns
out to be something of a ghoul. The town's matriarch,
Francine Whiting, is a witch complete with feline familiar. And Empire Falls
itself is a ghost town, abandoned by American industry yet haunted by the dream
of its
vibrantly capitalist past. The Empire Falls of America's Golden Age stalks the
present town like a vision:
It was the first weekend in October, and the air was crisp, the leaves
approaching their peak, the Knox River sparkling the blue of the reflected sky.
Empire Falls looked, in fact, like it had been replaced overnight with a better
version of itself.
This better version of Empire Falls isn't really the old Empire Falls, but an
idealized vision of the past. We have already
seen it sitting in the town's planning and development office:
along one whole wall sat a scale model of downtown Empire Falls, so
obviously idealized that he didn't immediately recognize it as the town he'd
lived his whole life in. The streets were lined with bright green toy trees, and
the buildings so brightly painted, the streets so clean, that Miles's first
thought was that this was an artist's notion of what a future Empire Falls
might look like after an ambitious and costly revitalization project. Only
closer inspection revealed that the model represented not the future but the
past.
The inhabitants of Empire Falls are just as haunted by dreams of the past. The hero, Miles Roby, resists his ex-wife's "naive belief that you
could just begin your life anew, as if the past didn't exist." He is right.
No one in the novel escapes. The local landscape is littered with
physical and emotional cripples. Even the high school principal is said to look
"haunted" by the ghost of a father who pushed him too hard to succeed
at sports.
The people of Empire Falls, in other words, are products. This isn't to say
they are unrealistic or unconvincing, only that they are creatures shaped by their environment. Like most novels that are about the life of a community, the structure
of the narrative is that of a web. The residents of Empire Falls are the points
connecting its threads, making patterns across time and space. But this is the
only real significance individuals have. Miles Roby is the main character in the
novel, but he is not an
important force in other people's lives (a fact he is often slow to realize). Russo's is a
fiction of relationships - the pattern they make is the life of the town.
Without Russo's understanding of what it is that makes a community, Empire Falls
would be a well-crafted but bland novel. That it isn't bland, that it manages to make
us care about its characters and even impress us with its wisdom, is a tribute
to Russo's identification with his material. Empire Falls is a place that feels lived
in. Despite the handling of narrative voice, which often places the reader in a
position superior to the people of the town, there is little of the
condescension of the tourist. Along with well-educated, literary Miles, we have the sense that we belong.
Notes:
Review first published online September 25, 2001.
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