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Russo, Richard Empire Falls
Vintage 12-Apr-02 375726403 Paperback
Amazon.com's Best of 2001;Like most of Richard Russo's earlier novels, Empire Falls is a tale of blue-collar life, which itself increasingly resembles a kind of high-wire act performed without the benefit of any middle-class safety nets. This time, though, the author has widened his scope, producing a comic and compelling ensemble piece. There is, to be sure, a protagonist: fortysomething Miles Roby, proprietor of the local greasy spoon and the recently divorced father of a teenage daughter. But Russo sets in motion a large cast of secondary characters, drawn from every social stratum of his depressed New England mill town. We meet his ex-wife Janine, his father Max (another of Russo's cantankerous layabouts), and a host of Empire Grill regulars. We're also introduced to Francine Whiting, a manipulative widow who owns half the town--and who takes a perverse pleasure in pointing out Miles's psychological defects. Miles does indeed have a tendency to take it on the chin. (At one point he alludes to his own natural propensity for shit-eating.) And his role as Mr. Nice Guy thrusts him into all sorts of clashes with his not-so-nice contemporaries, even as the reader patiently waits for him to blow his top. It would be impossible to summarize Russo's multiple plot lines here. Suffice it to say that he touches on love and marriage, lust and loss and small-town economics, with more than a soupçon of class resentment stirred into the broth. This is, in a sense, an epic of small and large frustrations: After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their heart's impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble. Yet Russo's comedic timing keeps the novel from collapsing into an orgy of breast-beating, and his dialogue alone--snappy and natural and efficiently poignant--is sufficient cause to put Empire Falls on the map. --Bob Brandeis --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. In the small Maine town of Empire Falls, replete with long defunct logging and textile mills, the Whiting clan embarks on its inexorable demise. The family has owned the town and controlled its environment, economy and inhabitants for generations. Why and how they bring about their own demise unfolds slowly, character by character, incident by incident, year by year. Listeners move as if by free association back and forth in time, layering the lives of Whitings and Robys, and learning about the families' complex interweaving that shapes all of their members. The book begins slowly, but readers are drawn ever deeper into the social saga and closer to the characters' strengths and weaknesses. Protagonist Miles Roby, forced by his mother's early death to abandon his college career, returns home to manage the Whiting family's Empire Grill, and meanwhile deals with divorce, devotion and devastation. McLarty sports a fine reading voice and makes excellent narrative choices. He has only a few special voices (e.g., Miles's profligate father), but it's always clear who is speaking. Free of emphatic attempts at characterization or dramatization, his subtle, unobtrusive narration allows Russo's terrific story to shine. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 9). Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Audio Cassette edition.
Price:
11.17 USD
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Russo, Richard Nobody's Fool
New York Random House 25-May-93 394577787 Hardcover
It's about time that people looking for a good read discovered the novels of Richard Russo. It's not just that he writes with panache, his verbal dexterity a mixture of biting wit and potent insight. He also endows his subjects-- blue-collar people living in economically desperate communities--with dignity, finding in their humble circumstances the essential questions of existence. Yet here as in his previous novels, Mohawk and The Risk Pool , the events in his protagonist's life are the material of rollicking high comedy. A succession of contretemps conspire to keep Donald Sully Sullivan mired in a morass of bad luck, compounded at every turn by his own stubborn, self-destructive streak. Financial solvency has always eluded Sully, an unemployed construction worker. At 60, he is suffering from a badly mangled, constantly aching knee, the consequence of a typically foolish accident; his pickup truck is moribund; his long-time mistress is restive; his ex-wife is on the verge of a nervous breakdown and his son Peter has come home for Thanksgiving with news that his marriage is disintegrating and that he has lost his job. Sully's sagging fortunes are mirrored by his community's decline. North Bath, N.Y., is a town prosperity has shunned: its signature hot springs mysteriously dried up years ago and a projected Ultimate Escape theme park is doomed never to materialize. Sully's financial problems might be solved by the sale of his dead father's dilapidated house, but Sully's gnawing hatred of Big Jim, a viciously mean, hypocritical bully, renders him incapable of profiting from his father's estate. His emotional distance from Big Jim left Sully incapable of forging a bond with Peter, or indeed, of establishing any relationship that he cannot address with a wisecrack or a teasing quip. In fact (and somewhat improbably), all the characters in the novel have the gift of a silver tongue: the dialogue often consists of verbal sparring, insults exhanged in comradely fashion. The narrative brims with memorable portraits: Sully's mentally dim and odoriferous sidekick, Rub Squeers; his feisty 80-year-old landlady and former grade-school teacher, Miss Beryl; his ex-wife, a woman animated by moral outrage and self pity; his mistress's stiletto-tongued daughter and her waif-like, wall-eyed child; his one-legged alcoholic lawyer--even his thoroughly wicked grandson, the pint-sized reincarnation of Big Jim. In delivering these personalities with a Dickensian skill, Russo again proves himself a shrewd observer of human nature, whose universal failings he scrutinizes with a comic eye and a compassionate heart. 50,000 first printing; major ad/promo; author tour. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Sixty-year-old Sully is nobody's fool, except maybe his own. Out of work (undeclared-income work is what he does, when he can), down to his last few bucks, hampered by an arthritic broken knee, Sully is worried that he's started on a run of bad luck. And he has. The banker son of his octogenarian landlady wants him evicted; Sully's estranged son comes home for Thanksgiving only to have his wife split; Sully's own high-strung ex-wife seems headed for a nervous breakdown; and his longtime lover is blaming him for her daughter's winding up in the hospital with a busted jaw. But Sully's biggest problem is the memory of his own abusive father, a ghost who haunts his every day. As he demonstrated in Mohawk (Random, 1986) and The Risk Pool (Random, 1989), Russo knows the small towns of upstate New York and the people who inhabit them; he writes with humor and compassion. A delight. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/93. - Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Price:
14.43 USD
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