[In the following review, Allen praises Russo's complex characterizations and effective interweaving of multiple plot threads in Empire Falls.]

If you're seeking the perfect summertime read—a roomy, absorbing book in which to wander around and lose yourself for several relaxing days—you probably can't do better than Richard Russo's immensely satisfying fifth novel, Empire Falls.

Russo's credentials as a serious writer who never fails to entertain were firmly established by his bighearted early novels Mohawk (1986) and The Risk Pool (1988), bittersweet comic chronicles of economic decline and moral growth set in the small towns of their author's native upstate New York. Russo achieved an even greater popularity with Nobody's Fool (1993), a dead-on portrayal of a charismatic 60-something wastrel that inspired a deservedly acclaimed Paul Newman film. Its successor, Straight Man (1997), is, if possible, an even funnier delineation of an embattled Everyman: Pennsylvania college professor Hank Devereaux, a likably rumpled mediocrity whose essential sanity and goodness stand him in excellent stead against the rising tide of crises created by brain-dead students, agenda-burdened colleagues, and his importunate extended family.

Empire Falls moves on to inland central Maine (doubtless making use of Russo's current tenure at Colby College, in Waterville). In the book's eponymous municipality, the protagonist, 40-ish Miles Roby, manages the Empire Grill, a forlorn vestige of the business empire founded by the Whiting family, whose once-prosperous textile mill and shirt factory have long since shut down. Where 40 years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people, cars, and commerce, there's now a dusty little hamlet pervaded by an atmosphere of resignation, depression, and decay.

In the triumphantly compact 50 or so pages that open the book, Russo traces, in italicized passages, the history of both the Whitings' pragmatic appropriation of their territory (cheating the impoverished Robideaux family out of commercially valuable land, diverting the course of the nearby Knox River to deflect floating trash toward others' properties) and the short, unhappy life of Charles Whiting. Charles fell in love with both Mexico and Miles's mother, Grace Roby (then very much married), and suffered through a loveless marriage to the former Francine Robideaux, now a widowed matriarch who literally looks down on Empire Falls (and on Miles, to whom she has vaguely “promised” the grill when she dies) from her lavish house high above both the town and the river.

Flashbacks to Miles's childhood and earlier years are seamlessly juxtaposed with the novel's catapulting present action, which takes the form of ongoing confrontations among its several major characters. Of these there are no fewer than 18, by my count, each of whom is vividly sketched and—in a feat of empathy matched by very few living novelists—given a legitimate and compelling claim on the reader's fascinated attention.

There's Miles's soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janine, for example, who has left him for the annoyingly peppy “Silver Fox” Walt Comeau, proprietor of a health club that has helped Janine shed 60 pounds, along with Miles, and build a fine new self-image.

Other characters keep dropping in at odd points—just as they might in real life—at the grill, where we also meet Miles's younger brother David (a disabled bachelor who's suspected of dealing marijuana), the beautiful waitress Charlene (whom Miles has loved unrequitedly since he was a teenager), and the binge-drinking dishwasher Buster. There are also neighborhood regulars such as newspaper reporter Horace Weymouth, the saturnine resident cynic who delivers many of his better one-liners whenever the Silver Fox shows up and holds court, and Miles's father, Max Roby, a frisky senile delinquent who thrives on mischievous antisocial behavior and subsists on occasional odd jobs and “loans” (which are never repaid) from Miles, who accepts just about any indignity that will keep the aging reprobate at a comfortable distance.

Though the grill may be considered the novel's center, Russo allows action to radiate outward to several other crucial locales. At the Whiting mansion, for instance, to which Miles is summoned for his annual “State of the Grill” meeting with his employer, Francine Whiting lives in regal semi-seclusion with her adult daughter Cindy, who has been crippled since a childhood encounter with a hit-and-run driver (who, it is suggested, may have been Max) and who is still shyly, hopelessly in love with the unresponsive Miles.

The tension between risk and timidity is explored in a more crucial way at the novel's other important location: the Empire Falls high school, where Miles's teenage daughter Christina (“Tick”) is warily edging toward maturity. She has also become unhappily acquainted with John Voss, a sullen fellow student whose own family history is revealed in the novel's explosive (some will say unduly melodramatic) climax and denouement.

What's most impressive about Empire Falls is the dexterity with which Russo interweaves its strong and complex plot with literally dozens of unerringly precise, often laugh-out-loud funny thumbnail sketches of its many characters in conflict, collusion, or eruption. And he has a remarkable gift for nailing in a perfect summary phrase a character trait (like Max's “cheerful, sensible cowardice in the face of unpleasantness”) or a crucial narrative or thematic point (such as the eventual realization “that John Voss was a tragically abused boy, that something in him was broken and that simple kindness might not be enough to fix it”).

The world of Empire Falls is at least distantly related to those of John Cheever's “Wapshot” novels and J. F. Powers's immaculately human stories of priests' lives, as well as the more recent community-oriented fiction of Anne Tyler and Jon Hassler. Russo is indisputably one of them: an unpretentious master of fictional technique whose deeper wisdom expresses itself in the distinctive fallibility, decency, humor, and grace of the indisputably, irresistibly real people he puts on the page.