Empire Falls | A Small Town's Bad Luck and Unlikely Hero
In the following excerpt, Epstein discusses how a small town’s aura of bad luck, its struggle against resignation, and an unlikely hero are the subject of Russo’s Empire Falls.
Jonathan Franzen, make no mistake, is a talented writer, with all the many moves of the contemporary novelist. He can do fancy fornication, anarchic humor, different cities (New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis), the police in a thousand voices. He has wide knowledge of how things work in the worlds of upscale restaurants and goofy leftist academic circles, and even knows a thing or two about investment banking. He includes in the novel a jaunt to Lithuania, where Chip helps operate an Internet scam for an entrepreneurial fraud named Gitanas and thereby enables his creator to get in a few...
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