For all that we mythologize the small town as “real America”, it’s not always what it’s cracked up to be. A small town, like Empire Falls, Maine, in Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, can be suffocating: everyone knows everyone else’s business, a few wealthy/well-connected people can exert outsized control, and opportunities can be slim. Miles Roby dreamed of escaping Empire Falls as a young man, and managed to get out to go to college for a few years before returning when his mother, Grace, got sick. That’s when he began working at the Empire Grill, which he now manages and hopes to one day purchase from Francine Whiting, the widow of the wealthy C.B. Whiting, who basically owns the town. The town was once home to successful mills, but those have long since closed and it seems like more than anything it’s the tenacity of the townspeople keeping it alive at all.
Miles himself is in a rough spot: his wife Janine has recently divorced him after cheating on him with Walt Comeau, the owner of a fitness club where Janine’s frantic exercising helped her lose quite a lot of weight. Their daughter Christine, called Tick, just broke up with the popular Zack Minty, son of police officer Jimmy Minty, who’s never liked Miles and finds little ways to harass him when he can. Zack, for his part, not only bothers Tick but also antagonizes fellow high-schooler John Voss, who has a bad home life. Francine’s daughter Cindy, who has long nursed an unrequited crush on Miles, has just returned to town…but Miles is thinking about finally acting on his own crush on waitress Charlene. And a trip that Miles took with his mother to Martha’s Vinyard as a child resurfaces in his memory, throwing everything he thought he knew about his childhood into question.
This is a book that I probably would have liked if I’d read it in my 20s. Books about families and relationships over time are ones that I tend to gravitate towards, and this digs deeply into two generations of Robys. But as I’ve matured as a reader, I’ve developed a more critical eye, and there are some serious issues with how Russo tells this story. The book is rife with subtle misogyny, particularly in the character of Janine. She’s written as vapid and shallow, obsessed with maintaining her weight loss, desperate to maintain the active sex life she enjoys with Walt, and inconsiderate of everyone around her. Miles’s perspective makes clear that he wasn’t a good husband to her (partly because he was constantly pining over his co-worker), but he is absolutely portrayed as the sympathetic party in their relationship. And then there’s a plot development at the end of the book that I thought was ill-considered and gratuitous in general, but specifically to this point used trauma inflicted on Tick to spur Miles to make an important decision for his own personal growth. Using female pain as a catalyst for male action is a trope that’s so deeply embedded in our storytelling that it’s hard to notice unless you’ve had your attention drawn to it, but once you see it, it’s everywhere, including here.
While this was published in 2001, well in advance of current political events, I came to it as a reader after the 2016 election. My interest level in narratives that seek to glorify small-town white dudes and center their problems as uniquely relevant and important is pretty low, and that’s exactly what this book does. It’s not a bad book, per se. Russo’s prose is high-quality and the plotting/storytelling was generally pretty solid (apart from the end, which I don’t intend to spoil, but I thought was cheap and unearned). It has the polish and heft of a prize-winning sort of book, so I’m not at all surprised that it won the Pulitzer. But at the end of the day I just didn’t enjoy reading it, and so I can’t recommend it for other readers either.
