Empire Falls
by Richard Russo
Summary
Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine, a town whose textile mill and shirt factory closed and whose river still floods. He has run the diner for twenty years on the understanding that Francine Whiting, widow of the last owner of everything, will leave it to him one day. She has no intention of doing so, and the reasons go back to Miles's mother and a summer decades earlier.
Around him: a wife leaving him for the owner of a fitness club, a brother with one usable arm, a policeman with a grudge from high school, and a father, Max, who is broke, filthy, cheerful and completely without shame, and who is the funniest character in modern American fiction to spend time with.
The best of it is Tick, Miles's sixteen year old daughter, carrying a sketchbook and a lunch tray through a high school where the seating plan is a map of the town's cruelties. Russo cuts to her often, and the reader gradually understands that one of her classmates is in serious trouble.
Russo is very good on work: the grill's orders, the priest who drinks, the school lunch line, the way a town keeps its accounts in favours rather than money. He is even better on the particular humiliation of a decent man who stayed to look after his mother and watched everyone else leave.
At around five hundred pages it is a leisurely, densely populated novel that asks you to learn a town rather than follow a story, comic for long stretches, and then the last fifty pages arrive somewhere you did not think it was going. Best for readers who want to live in a place for a while, and who will forgive a slow first hundred pages for what it sets up.
Historical Context & Significance
Empire Falls won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, beating two finalists that were far more discussed at the time, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days.
Richard Russo grew up in Gloversville, New York, a town that made gloves until the industry left, and every one of his novels returns to a place where the work has gone and the people have not.
He adapted it himself for HBO in 2005 as a two part film directed by Fred Schepisi, with Ed Harris as Miles, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Joanne Woodward. Paul Newman played Max and won an Emmy Award, a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for it. The Emmy was the only one of his career.