Empire Falls [Unabridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Richard Russo (Author), Ron Mclarty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 22, 2001

From his first novel, Mohawk, to his most recent, Straight Alan, Richard Russo has demonstrated great affinity for the tragicomic human condition, and here he expands his geographical and psychological claims on the small town, blue-collar heart of the country.

Empire Falls, Maine, has seen the inexorable failure of its logging and textile industries, the once mighty holdings of the Whiting clan, presided over by the last scion's widow, now mostly amount to decrepit real estate.

Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom front the Empire Grill, an opportunity that has become the albatross of his ambitions. Brought home from college by family obligations-- his mother ailing, his father it loose cannon -- Miles himself now has a divorce to contend with, but also a beloved daughter to guide gently through adolescence.

Miles also proves an excellent guide to this hardscrabble, persistent community: fathers and sons and daughters, living and dead, rich and poor. Shot through with mysteries of generations and the shattering visitations of the nation at large -- Empire Falls is a social novel of stunning ambition, and a master storyteller's magnum opus.

Editorial Reviews

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In the small Maine town of Empire Falls, replete with long defunct logging and textile mills, the Whiting clan embarks on its inexorable demise. The family has owned the town and controlled its environment, economy and inhabitants for generations. Why and how they bring about their own demise unfolds slowly, character by character, incident by incident, year by year. Listeners move as if by free association back and forth in time, layering the lives of Whitings and Robys, and learning about the families' complex interweaving that shapes all of their members. The book begins slowly, but readers are drawn ever deeper into the social saga and closer to the characters' strengths and weaknesses. Protagonist Miles Roby, forced by his mother's early death to abandon his college career, returns home to manage the Whiting family's Empire Grill, and meanwhile deals with divorce, devotion and devastation. McLarty sports a fine reading voice and makes excellent narrative choices. He has only a few special voices (e.g., Miles's profligate father), but it's always clear who is speaking. Free of emphatic attempts at characterization or dramatization, his subtle, unobtrusive narration allows Russo's terrific story to shine. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 9).

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: HarperAudio; Unabridged edition (May 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0694525596
• ISBN-13: 978-0694525591
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.3 x 2.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (523 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,234,209 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rick Russo is the author of six previous novels and THE WHORE'S CHILD, a collection of stories. In 2002, he received the Pulitzer Prize for EMPIRE FALLS. He lives with his wife in Camden, Maine, and Boston.
Photo credit Elena Seibert

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

123 of 129 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful novel that will stay with you, January 16, 2004

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)

The elegance of this 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning novel can be described best by one of his characters, teenager Tick, who decides "just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them." Miles, the central character of Russo's story, runs the Empire Grill in economically depressed Empire Falls, Maine. He ekes out a life hoping for parity: that his loyalty to the grill and to its wealthy owner Mrs. Whiting will result in his owning the business, that his patience with his daughter Tick will be rewarded with openness, that his soon-to-be-ex wife Janine will find what was lacking in him in her fiancé Walt, that his youthful failure to escape the town will have some redemption. But the complexity of Mrs. Whiting's interest in him remains out of his grasp, and the dynamics of Tick's life are largely hidden from him. Janine has a growing need for exactly what she hated so much about Miles. Worst of all, Miles sees himself as destined to remain a loser who gives and never gets. Russo explores the storylines of all these characters and others, allowing the reader intimate glimpses into their lives. In Empire Falls, relationships between husbands and wives and between parents and children are never simple. Russo's characters suffer in ways that are passionately ordinary - that is, until everything funnels into one explosive, extraordinary moment. I literally had to put the book down to absorb this climatic scene. That this scene was both prepared for and totally shocking speaks to the author's skill.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. The characters are lively and sympathetic - even the ones that might be called villains - and despite the quiet nature of the narrative, it is a difficult book to put down.

79 of 83 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Russo 's Poignant Tale of Small Town Life Is Rewarding Read, September 22, 2002

By 

Antoinette Klein (Hoover, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)

This is my first novel by Richard Russo and I was captivated by his ability to breathe life into a diverse group of characters. From protagonist Miles Roby to his irascible father Max, his hauntingly sad mother Grace, his nemesis Mrs. Whiting, his touching daughter Tick, and many more, we are treated to people described so vividly they come to life and seem like the people we might know and want to either hang out with or avoid at all costs if we lived in Empire Falls.

There are too many plot lines to detail, but they all are brought together nicely and no reader is left with unanswered questions thanks to an interesting epilogue.

All the problems of seeking a better life but being relegated to the blue collar life of a mill town whose mill has long closed, are embodied in Miles Roby, reluctant proprietor of the town's grill. In the opening pages he sees his teen-age daughter Tick walking home from school with a hunched back weighed down by her symbolic backpack representing all the problems she faces---the dissolution of her parents marriage, a stepfather she despises, a widening emotional gap with her mother, the dreaded loss of friends and social standing, and being coupled with the school's most tortured and disturbed student.

The story moves slowly but the characters are so richly drawn you will be totally engrossed and hard pressed to put this one down. When the story does reach its climax, there are plenty of shocks and surprises and a realization that life is not perfect and its flaws are with us forever to either cope with or be overwhelmed by.

42 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Patient readers will be rewarded..., January 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Empire Falls (Paperback)

I will admit that about halfway through Empire Falls, I put it away for a few days. Although fascinating in its nuance and delightful in its humor, it was beginning to plod (so I thought) and I began to wonder whether it quite deserved the prestiguous prize on its cover.

Little did I realize the expertise of its author. He knows exactly what he's doing, bringing a complex tale to a slow boil. When the fever of rumination breaks toward the end, when something big really does happen, the reader is that much more taken by it because Russo has done more than introduce the characters--he has brought you into their lives, into their heads, and you genuinely care about their fate. Every one of the citizens in Empire Falls is a real, complex, believable person. At least once I had to remind myself that this heartbreaking tale, so vividly funny and genuinely tragic, is a work of fiction.

That Russo teases humor from sadness in such a natural, graceful way would make The Empire Falls a remarkable book. What makes it literature is its relevance, its reality, the fact that it might as well be a true story.