Reviews for Empire Falls

The average rating for Empire Falls based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-06-29 00:00:00 Tatsuhiko Yamamoto I suspect that most people reading this review do NOT live in the hometown where they were born. You didn't marry your high school sweetheart and/or, going on forty, you're not still secretly in love with an old sweetheart who still lives in town. You don't live in a couple of sleazy rooms above the diner you run. Your ex-alcoholic brother and your borderline anorexic teen-aged daughter don't flip burgers and wait tables for you. Your ex-wife's new husband doesn't hang out drinking coffee at the lunch counter trying to be your friend: "No hard feelings." Your Dad doesn't come in trying to get free food and steal beer money from the register. The high school bully doesn't still bully you (and now he's a cop). Your ex-mother-in-law doesn't run the bar across the street from your diner. (But you're still friends with her because you're the harmless type of guy that mothers want their daughters to marry). You don't frequently go out of your way to park outside the house you grew up in and despair that it is now deteriorated and occupied by drug dealers. To me, a major theme of this book is what it would be like to have stayed in your hometown. As a geographer I enjoy reading and thinking about this theme. There are Movers and Stayers and even research studies about how these folks are different - we all know both types. A recent Pew Research study () found that "movers" tend to be college educated; they move for jobs and once they move out of their hometown they are likely to move again in search of better employment and greener pastures. The "stayers," about 37% of American adults who still live in or around the town they were born in, stay for family ties. The Mid West has the highest proportion of stayers; the West the least; East and South are in the middle. The story: you have snippets of the story in the things I wrote above about movers and stayers. There is a real story here, almost a plot that becomes evident as the story moves along. It's tightly knit and revealed bit by bit as we learn the significance of events that the boy experienced early in life without understanding then what was happening. (And it takes him 40 years to figure some of it out.) We're in a dying former mill town in Maine, a few hours from Boston. A significant component of the story actually involves mover and stayer philosophy: when the main character's mother was dying from cancer, she implored him, more or less: "Get out of this town; get out - don't stay --- that's why I sent you away to college." Even though his mother dies, he chooses to drop out of college and stay. An aging widow runs the town. Her family owns the now-abandoned shirt factory that almost everyone used to work in; she even owns the diner that the main character runs and she owns the bar that his mother-in-law runs. Not realizing the full story of how events fit together, even as an adult, the main character does not understand that the widow runs people as well as the town and that she is wreaking vengeance on him in subtle but vicious ways. Along the way we get glimpses of modern American life in such a has-been place. The re-occurring Trump-like rumors born of desperation that the factory will re-open (as if Americans are going to start making shirts again for $2 an hour); the church closings due to population loss; the probably-gay priest; the desperation of the left-behind elderly like his father who have to "borrow" and scam people for beer money; a horrendous school violence incident. Here are a few passages I liked and some reveal a little more of the story: The short man disliked calling attention to that fact, so "The furniture was of the sort used in model homes and trailers to give the impression of spaciousness; this optical illusion worked well enough except on those occasions when large people came to visit, and then the effect was that of a lavish dollhouse." "Kids today stuffed the entire contents of their lockers into their seam-stitched backpacks and brought it all home, probably, Miles figured, so they wouldn't have to think through what they'd need and what they could do without, thereby avoiding the kinds of decisions that might trail consequences." "To her way of thinking, any man with no more sex drive than Miles Roby [the main character] possessed might better have just gone ahead and embraced celibacy and been done with it, instead of disappointing poor girls like herself." [the teen-aged daughter thinks:] "…at least she didn't have to go to church anymore now that her mother had replaced Catholicism with aerobics." "The donut shop in Empire Falls had always been one of Max Roby's favorite places because of its smoking policy, which was, 'Go ahead. See if we care.'" The old Alzheimer-prone priest thinks of the main character's father: "…he'd always held Max Roby in the lowest possible esteem as a blasphemer, a shiftless charmer, a drinker and a general ne'er-do-well. What he seemed less clear about was why he'd objected to these qualities." The younger priest says of the older priest's strange utterances: "I understand why it's coming out but how do you suppose it got in there?" "Listening to people talk on the telephone, for Father Tom's way of thinking, was the next best thing to hearing confessions." When the main character is a young boy, his father is arrested as a public nuisance: "Having this short phrase to describe him was better than suspecting that his father was so different and unnatural that nobody had yet invented a way to describe him." "It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleaguered by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. … Surely God must have other projects besides Man, just as parents had responsibilities other than raising their children?" I liked the well-knit, slowly revealed plot and I loved the humor and the irony, shown in some of the quotes above. A great read and I'm adding it to my favorites --- first one in a couple of months. photo of Gem Diner, syracusenews.com mill in Maine from abnf.co

Review # 2 was written on 2017-07-17 00:00:00 John Past "Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there's but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice. People speak of selfishness, but that's another folly, because of course there's no such thing." I've been pondering this quote for some time now after having finished Richard Russo's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Empire Falls. Is it true that we have no choice in where our lives take us? Do we only perceive that we have choices and opportunities, whereas in fact our paths are predetermined? Or does believing such a precept just mean that one is placing blame on circumstances that can in fact be overcome? The message may be found within the pages of this extraordinary novel. Empire Falls centers on the lives of those characters that live in this small town of Maine. During its glory days, the town flourished due to the logging and textile industries run by the all-powerful Whiting family. Nowadays, the town is run-down, yet many of its inhabitants remain hopeful that some day it will once again prosper. This is due largely to the fact that the mill and the factory remain intact, a vision of what used to be and what could be if someone would only grasp the opportunity. What does remain and stands as the focal point of the actual happenings in the town is the Empire Grill. "The Empire Grill was long and low-slung, with windows that ran its entire length, and since the building next door, a Rexall drugstore, had been condemned and razed, it was now possible to sit at the lunch counter and see straight down Empire Avenue all the way to the old textile mill and its adjacent shirt factory. Both had been abandoned now for the better part of two decades, though their dark, looming shapes at the foot of the avenue's gentle incline continued to draw the eye." It is here that we meet Miles Roby, manager of the Empire Grill. What fascinates me about small towns is the fact that many of its people really never get away. Despite economic instability, there is a core of folks that seem to stick it out - perhaps they don't perceive a means of escape or maybe they see the town for what it once was and that memory eclipses any sense of hardship. Miles Roby, with a major push and the support of his mother, did get out only to return once again due to circumstances that seemed out of his control. Now under the thumb of Francine Whiting, reigning heiress to the Whiting fortune, Miles seems to have reached a dead end, much like the town itself. He lives in a shabby apartment over the grill, is soon to be divorced, and has responsibilities to his teenage daughter, Tick, his deadbeat father, Max, and his recovering alcoholic brother, David. Through him we also meet a wealth of other complex individuals - some good, some not so good, and some downright cringe-worthy. And yet, under the masterful pen of Russo, each character is written in a way that completely absorbs your full attention. However mundane each person appears on the surface, he or she still manages to throb with life on each page. The interactions and dialogue in this book are superb - believable, gripping, sometimes sad, and often humorous. The novel is at heart a character-driven story. There exists a plot that is very slowly and deliberately revealed - a couple of turns that I did not fully anticipate. Don't expect quick action - you will be disappointed. And yet, I found myself nearly holding my breath towards the end of the book; I was that entangled with the lives of the characters. I was hopeful for the future of the town and its people. There was something in nearly each person that I could relate to and understand. What I came to realize in the end is that we should each grab hold of our dreams, take control of our circumstances, and in fact change the direction of that river. We may not end up exactly where we imagined, but neither do we need to flounder and succumb to its currents. I think it would be safe to say that even though this is my first (I know right, where have I been?!) Richard Russo novel, he will be on my list of favorite authors! This book has those elements I adore in my books - memorable and extremely well-drawn characters, brilliant writing, and surprising plot twists. 5 stars "After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts' impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?"