SOURCE: Hower, Edward. “Small-Town Dreams: Disappointment Haunts the Characters in Richard Russo's Depiction of Life in a Hapless Maine Backwater Town.” World and I 16, no. 10 (October 2001): 243.

[In the following review, Hower notes that Russo strikes a good balance between reality and morality in Empire Falls, arguing that the novel's “main strength is its skillfully developed characters”]

In art museums, people crowd around pictures of demons, like the ones in Hieronymus Bosch's grotesque landscapes, yet walk right by visions of radiant angels, hardly pausing to yawn. Evil is often a lot more interesting than virtue—in literature as well as art. It's not easy for writers to make their good characters as compelling as their villains, but Richard Russo manages this skillfully in his new novel, Empire Falls. His good-hearted everyman hero, Miles, runs the diner in a small, decaying Maine town and is just as enjoyable to read about as the bad guys (and women) who test his integrity.

American writers—from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson to Garrison Keillor—have always made small towns dramatic settings for conflicts between corruption and decency, probably because people live more public lives in small settings. In the old mill town of Empire Falls, people have known each other's families for generations, and a talented writer like Russo can make us believe that we know them all too. He has specialized in small-town dramas: three of his previous books—Mohawk, Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool—were about working-class people in parts of rural upstate New York that the modern world has all but left behind. Nobody's Fool became a film starring Paul Newman, who played the irresponsible but lovable lout Sully, the kind of bad-news, out-of-luck old guy who's too canny and stubborn to go under, though his time was up years ago. He's not exactly a villain, but he's such an outrageous outlaw that it's hard not to hope he'll outsmart his betters, especially when they're conventional and boring.

In Risk Pool, a much darker book than Mohawk or Nobody's Fool, the no-good father was a tragic character; we watched him spiral out of control, damaging himself and everyone around him as he fell. Such compelling outlaws are scattered through the pages of Empire Falls, as well. Here, though, Russo sets himself the difficult task of making the mildest and least glamorous of his townspeople the most compelling. It's not so much what Miles does but what he gradually discovers about himself and the role his family has played in the town's history that makes him such a fascinating character.

SOCIAL HISTORY

In Russo's other books, the forces that have caused small towns to decline have been left vague—time has merely forgotten them. In Empire Falls, though, the upper class (which still owns everything) is as well defined as the working classes that have done the bidding of the old mill-owning families. We get a sense of the historical processes that have led to the town's decline: the pollution of its river, the exploitation of its citizens, and the abandonment of the area once it has ceased to be profitable.

At the top of the social pyramid is Mrs. Francine Whiting, powerful widow of one of the most ineffectual of the robber barons who have run the area for over a century. Because Mrs. Whiting has helped his family over the years, Miles feels obligated to manage part of her property, the town's only restaurant. Only when he learns why she has done so—by no means out of the goodness of her heart—does he begin to wriggle free of her control.

Mrs. Whiting is a formidable and intriguing witch: cold, manipulative, devious, and much stronger, we learn in a series of flashbacks, than her late husband, Charlie, or C. B., ever was. Charlie, who has killed himself under mysterious circumstances by the time the book's main story begins, would rather have lived in Mexico with his mistress than in Maine trying to run his family's businesses. He sometimes remarks that “he always had the last word in all differences of opinion with his wife, and that—two words, actually—was, ‘Yes, dear.’” Like other Whiting men, Charlie is drawn “toward the one woman in the world who would regard making [him] utterly miserable as her life's noble endeavor.”

When he dies, his wife places a monument over his grave “to insure that her husband stayed right where he was.” Charlie was the last of the old order:

Compared to the monuments marking the graves of the other Whiting males, C. B.'s was the runt of the litter. … Its being significantly smaller gave the impression that his stone alone had not grown after being planted, as if the corpses of his predecessors had already sucked all the nutrients out of the soil.

With C. B. gone, Mrs. Whiting occupies her time keeping a tight grip on all the townspeople's lives. Having manipulated Miles' mother into taking care of her disabled daughter, Cindy, she tries to get Miles to marry the unhappy young woman. When his wife, Janine, leaves him, the time seems perfect, but Miles drags his feet. Timmy, Mrs. Whiting's cat (who is actually female, despite the name), seems even more impatient than her owner is, since she scratches and bites him every time he visits the Whiting estate.

Timmy, the witch's familiar, becomes one of the book's many marvelously comic minor characters. “Oh, it's not just you, dear boy,” Mrs. Whiting tells Miles after one of the cat's attacks. “She treats everyone who isn't family with the same exquisite malice. She dug a furrow the length of the mayor's forearm just last week didn't you, sweetheart?” Wisely, Miles takes the cat's hostility as a warning to keep his distance from Mrs. Whiting until he has fully understood her motives.

SMALL-TOWN VILLAINS

Mrs. Whiting's henchman among the town's working class is Jimmy Minty, the local cop. On her payroll as well as the town's, he lets himself into people's houses with his skeleton key for a little additional income now and then. “Steal small,” he remembers the words of his father. “Remember ‘the bother principle’ … they won't bother you over little things.”

His father also told him, “Ambition … it'll kill you every time,” and Jimmy has taken this to heart. “Mr. Empire Falls? That's me,” he tells Miles. Jimmy never left town to try to do better for himself, as Miles did when he went to college for three years. When people look at Jimmy, they see someone who reassures them that trying to escape the provincial life isn't worth the trouble. This is why he feels comfortable with most of the town's citizens and vice versa. But with Miles he feels stupid and inferior; unlike Jimmy, Miles sees the world as 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.”

Miles' father, Max, hasn't much more vision than Jimmy, yet he's more substantial than the cop, whom he dislikes as much as his son does. Max is a bridge between the hopeless and the idealistic people of Empire Falls. An irresponsible, self-centered housepainter who cadges drinks and shames his wife, he remains filled with energy, determination, and a refusal to give in to the apparent futility of life in a dying town. He comes and goes as he pleases, traveling to jobs where he paints people's windows shut and takes off with the money before his shoddy work can be discovered.

Max is a familiar father figure in Russo's fiction, a feisty old guy not unlike Sully in Nobody's Fool. It's hard to dislike anyone who thumbs his nose so boldly at both the town's conventional middle-class citizens and the rich and powerful. He exasperates Miles, who is too good-hearted to reject him. Miles' teenage daughter, Tick, also feels affection for her grandfather. When his beard is full of crumbs, which is a lot of the time, Tick cleans them off and Max smiles in gratitude. Seeing this, Miles suspects that his father is “basically a lower primate. He enjoyed being groomed.”

It's because of Tick, Miles says, that he clings to the security of running the Empire Grill. He wants to maintain their stable home and close relationship, especially since her mother has moved in with the dim, middle-aged hunk who runs the local health club. Janine is one of the book's many comic characters, a woman who keeps refusing to see the disasters she's creating for herself until it's too late. Russo treats all his characters with compassion, however, and gives Janine credit for trying to change—she does lose sixty pounds—and for understanding how life in a small town can destroy some people. As she watches the cheerleaders at a high school football game, she imagines what life may be like for them and the players by whom they'll soon be pregnant. “How swiftly life would descend,” she thinks.

“First the panic that maybe they'd have to go through it alone, then the quick marriage to prevent that grim fate, followed by relentless house and car payments and doctors' bills and all the rest. The joy they took in this rough sport would gradually mutate. [The boys would] gravitate to bars … to get away from these same girls and then the children neither they nor their wives would be clever and independent enough to prevent. There would be the sports channel on the tavern's wide-screen TV and plenty of beer. … A few of the more adventurous or desperate wives would … meet another of these boy-men … out at the Lamplighter Motor Court for a little taste of the road not taken, only to discover that it was pretty much the same shabby, two-lane blacktop they'd been traveling all along.”

A HUMOROUS VISION

Russo's vision of small-town life, often bleak in his previous books, is tempered with a great deal of satirical and affectionate humor here. Timmy's inventive aggression and Janine's pratfalls provide running gags throughout the novel. Walt is constantly trying to compensate Miles for stealing his wife by providing screwball business tips, which Miles has the sense to ignore. When Walt finally marries Janine, he has to borrow money for the wedding ring (from Mrs. Whiting, who else?). The ceremony is held in his health club with the yoga mats leaned up against the walls, “which suggested that some of the revelers might be driving bumper cars.”

Russo generates comedy through numerous other inhabitants of Empire Falls, including Charlene, the buxom “full service waitress,” who “never shirked from reminding people that there was no excuse for wasting food when other people were going hungry.” She doesn't mind interrupting local professors who, no matter how erudite their conversations, still tip her like all the other male customers, “according to cup size.”

Then there is Mrs. Rodriguez, the high school art teacher who browbeats her students into studying her favorite painter, an artist who hosts a local-access TV show called Painting for Relaxation. She keeps her bowling-pin-shaped husband cowed with her “sense of thwarted superiority,” but Tick, like her father, sees through the teacher's pretensions.

Officer Jimmy Minty, corrupt as he is, can also be a figure of fun. In a flashback, he recalls waking up after a drunken party at a college friend's fraternity house, finding himself covered with tiny cuts, worrying that he might have murdered someone during the night. When he discovers the cuts are merely from an exploded lightbulb, he's very relieved.

He'd planned on applying to the Maine Police Academy, and it wouldn't look good on his application if he'd gone and killed some girl at that party, even if he explained that he was drunk at the time and didn't remember. It had taken him the better part of a year to come up with the police academy idea, and he didn't want to have to start all over, even with the leisure of a lengthy prison sentence to develop other career possibilities.

Russo's previous novels have been criticized for meandering plots and overly complicated subplots. In Empire Falls, the to-ing and fro-ing of his characters around town seems an appropriate substitute for a linear plot. As they meet and talk and move on, a sense of claustrophobia develops in a setting where people indeed sometimes seem to be driving bumper cars and bouncing off walls. One plotline—that of an outcast high school boy whom Tick and Miles befriend—skirts uncomfortably close to melodrama at the story's end, adding a tinge of tragedy that seems incongruous.

The book's main strength is its skillfully developed characters. Russo's art lies in the humor and compassion with which he creates them all, especially the thoughtful, long-suffering manager of the Empire Grill. Miles treats the pitiful Cindy Whiting with great kindness, despite her mother's machinations, as he does everyone else in Empire Falls, even the wife who has left him but keeps returning to the restaurant for his advice. His close relationship with Tick and his refusal to judge weaker people harshly amount to a quiet but appealing strength. The way he constantly struggles to maintain his compassion and integrity in the face of conventionality, defeatism, and all the evils of small-town life makes him a continually engaging character.

Richard Russo's canvas may be small, but he has written a big book, populated by a wide variety of complex, fascinating characters. Empire Falls is unusual in its ability to champion moral virtue and to keep it as compelling—and constantly amusing—as the forces of corruption that try in vain to defeat it.