Richard Russo is a fine writer; he is funny and clever, and I think he may understand some of the glaring weaknesses of men as spouses, parents, friends about as well as any male author I can think of. His male lead characters in Straight Man, Nobody’s Fool and The Risk Pool are drawn in clearly sympathetic ways, and yet each of the men seems simply befuddled by his spouse or lover; each is apparently loving but unable really to communicate or even to open up lines of communication with his loved ones, and although in some ways socially or politically astute, each seems unable really to take themselves seriously or to do anything with their awareness. There are (as I recall) also very strong women characters in each of these books, and Russo is able to make it clear that he genuinely admires them—as spouses, as parents, as people who do take themselves seriously in the world, and his male characters always seem to hope (in vain?) to learn something from these exemplary women.
Miles Roby, the lead character in Empire Falls is just such a man, and I suppose that one of the things that almost immediately irritated me about the book was the similarity between Miles and all Russo’s other well-meaning but obtuse male leads. Miles is separated from his wife whom he seems not to understand at all; he is a caring and even diligent father to his teenage daughter, but generally it seems that it is she who must take care of him. His father, a much worse husband, communicator, parent, or serious-person-in-the-world than Miles, seems in most ways simply one of the male characters from an earlier Russo novel grown into the pessimistic and ineffectual old man he was destined all along to become.
Miles’ mother, beautiful, wise, and self-sacrificing seems also to be a reincarnation of one of Russo’s earlier female characters. Whatever his father lacks in seriousness and self-discipline, his mother makes up for by seeming to have no life of her own at all. She is a mother, a wife, a provider, and she dies young—all seemingly ingredients in what Russo sees as the good woman. She has one glorious vacation on Martha’s Vinyard, even a night or two of loving and being loved (with a man whom the reader supposes she simply met there), and for this she pays, and pays, and pays.
So, having said so little good about the novel up to now, why would I review it or recommend it? Well, for one thing it is a typical but important story to tell about how small towns (as well as big cities) often die at the mercy of the rich. A small factory town in Maine, Empire Falls flourishes for a generation or two due to the success of the shirt and textile factories that operate on the river. Almost everything in the town is owned by the same family who owns the factories, and when (through whim, or boredom, or less than expected financial returns) the last factory is closed down, it is the townspeople (and not the owners) who suffer. Many simply leave, forced to pull up stakes and find work somewhere else. Those who remain struggle simply to get by, their homes (just in case they own them) not worth much, but what else are they to do? And there is always the hope that the factory will come alive again.
Miles runs a little restaurant, owned, of course, by Mrs. Whiting, the widow of the last in the line of Whitings who have made their money by buying up whatever they saw and simply holding it as a hedge against the future. A literary type by nature and the hope of his mother who has sacrificed everything so that he could go to college and escape Empire Falls, Miles and his brother make a meager living running the restaurant. Miles left college and returned to Empire Falls due to his mother’s cancer, and although he knows how much she would hate it, inertia and some distorted sort of loyalty keep him there even after she dies. Miles, too dispassionate even to be bitter, simply suffers his existence, buoyed at least slightly by his bright and wonderful daughter (who lives now with his estranged wife).
While I would not call this book a political one, nevertheless it is distinctly blue-collar, and the sympathies of the author are obviously with the townspeople and not the wealthy owners. Indeed, we find eventually that the Whitings have simply been holding onto the land, the factory, the town, because they knew that some parts would eventually be attractive to outside money. And, indeed, the factory is finally purchased by some corporation that specializes in buying and selling companies that have some valuable inventory and can in one way or another either turn a profit or serve as tax-breaks. The hopes of the town are raised to a temporary ecstasy when the factory is purchased by outside money; the few who are employed show how they will work for little, and then for less, in order to help increase profits. But, alas, the comparatively small profits to be had have never been much of an issue with the owners, and when the time comes, the inventory, the equipment, is simply sold off, and the factory sold off because of the soon to be valuable river-front land. The employees are let go without so much as a thought. And this not out of malice or intent, but simply because of the necessary blindness of corporate greed.
There is more to the book than I have mentioned; I find Russo’s fascination with religion interesting. Miles, a Catholic by birth and then by a kind of devotion to his saintly dead mother, can neither embrace Catholicism nor completely abandon it. He paints the church for free while taking a skeptical role in arguments over theology with the new priest, and I am convinced it is Russo who is doing the struggling, the questioning, wanting really to believe what he is quite sure is not true. I like also at least one of the women characters in the book, one whom I would say has occurred in other incarnations in other of his novels. The woman, a few years older than Miles, has been his heart-throb since boyhood, although Miles seems unable to act on his infatuation in any way other than comparing her goodness to his wife’s deficiencies.
Most of all, Russo is a funny man, and he creates male characters that I like to laugh at, and whom I also encounter far too often in the mirror. Indeed, he seems to know quite a lot about these men, and even something about how they might rise up out of their passive existential despair and do something. Maybe in his next novel.
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