"The history of American literature may show that Richard Russo wrote the last great novel of the 20th century."This is very likely true.
Empire Falls is a gala of a novel, where you are passed effortlessly from denizen to denizen from the small town of Empire Falls, Maine, dancing a waltz to the music of time. The rhythm is unhurried, perhaps because in so many ways, you and the characters have no place else better to be than in this figment of Richard Russo's imagination. Or at least, you the reader do not, but the characters on the other hand will spend the entire novel struggling with that very premise, and in the process, we too ask ourselves: well, how did they get there?
Empire Falls is a meditation on human time and human space, but whose musings on the subjects are always incidental to the story itself. Set in a dying mill town in rural Maine about 12 years ago, the plot revolves around all of the people who are the main characters in the story of Miles Roby's life. Miles Roby is a middle-aged short-order cook, and manager of a diner in town. He is separated from his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Janine, who set in motion the unraveling of their marriage by cheating on Miles with the owner of the local fitness club. Janine has a fire lit under her ass to be rid of her plodding marriage almost as much as she's ready to be rid of her plodding husband. She itches to take up with her lover, "that little banty rooster" Walt Comeau (the self-styled "Silver Fox"), in an agitated fit of determination to reinvent her life while there's still a life to reinvent. Miles and Janine are proud parents to an introverted, astute 16 year-old daughter, Tick, who is chiefly preoccupied with measuring within herself which of her personality components are from her beloved father, and which are careless hand-me-downs from her self-centered mother. Helping him run the diner is his moody younger brother David, his beautiful, unavailable boyhood crush Charlene, and another short-order cook, Buster, who spends most of the novel off-screen on a bender.
Perched above the blooming chaos of Miles Roby's life is the willful, deliberate Francine Whiting, heiress to the Whiting fortune, whose money and industry built Empire Falls. She married into the family long ago, and became the custodian of its inheritances when her husband shot himself in plain sight of their crippled daughter. Mrs. Whiting vulpine presence as capricious benefactor is as much of a character as the personage herself, and no more strongly felt than when Miles and David struggle to think of ways to improve the profits of their grille, of which Mrs. Whiting remains the owner. She must always be dealt with. Miles many meetings with Mrs. Whiting are dramatic, for all of the low stakes involved, as in spite of her frequent attestations of affection for Miles, you and he cannot escape the feeling that she is deftly manipulating Miles into fulfilling some master plan that benefits her and her alone.
Miles has been firmly in her grip ever since his mother died 20 years ago, when he dropped out of college to take care of her as she lay dying of cancer. Mrs. Whiting arranged for Miles to take over the Empire Grill when the proprietor died as a stop-gap measure, and there he remained long after his mother died, through the beginning and end of a marriage, the birth and adolescent blossoming of his only daughter, and the continued eclipse of Empire Falls.
Nothing aforementioned is an unique event, and all of these things are the kind of pages in a life's story that are familiar to millions of people across America. But beneath the predictable unfolding of Miles Roby's and Empire Falls' senescence, the slow accumulation of decline, disappointment, and degeneration have created a seam of untapped, coal-black fury. In Cormac McCarthy's memorable phrase, "All progressions from a higher to a lower order are marked by ruins and mystery and a residue of nameless rage"* - and this is no less true of rural Maine than anywhere else history has passed on by. Both man and town are drifting inexorably toward ruin, and the final quarter of the novel witnesses the eruption of the seam.
Normally, a novel that takes 350 pages out of 483 before the plot quickens is a novel that is destined for the farthest back shelf of the bookstore. Yet, this slow progression does not detract from the novel at all. Russo is a nimble and gifted enough writer, that you may not be moving fast, but you are still enjoying every minute with every character. As soon as you get bored, you switch to another character, and off you are again, plumbing another mind and another set of secrets and dreams deferred of Empire Falls. This slowness of action but quickness of mind is payed a sly tribute in one of the book's best passages as her world crumbles over the precipice into bloody chaos:
"Slow, Tick decides. Things happen slow. She isn't quite sure why this understanding of the world's movement should be important, but she thinks it is....Take her parents. At the time, their separation had seemed a bolt from the blue, though she now realizes it had been a slow process, rooted in their dissatisfaction and need-in their personalities, really...And that really, is the story of Miles Roby and Empire Falls, and so many of the rest of us. We can lose ourselves in familiar rhythms, learn all of the steps of our routines by heart, but one day the music stops. Often as not, it happens just when we've convinced ourselves that we have finally mastered the dance.
And that's the thing, she concludes. Just because things happen slow doesn't mean you'll be ready for them. If they happened fast, you'd be alert for all kinds of suddenness, aware that speed was trump. 'Slow' works on an altogether different principle, on the deceptive impression that there's plenty of time to prepare, which conceals the central fact, that no matter how slow things go, you'll always be slower." (p. 441)
* Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West, 1985
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