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A review by doctorwithoutboundaries
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
3.0
Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
My displeasure with this book is the fault of my expectations. I went into this expecting an indictment of capitalism, a realisation of Luddite fears, a portrait of a hollowed-out middle America that has crumbled under the enormous weight of globalist greed. But the town of Empire Falls, with its empty shell of a factory, once the provider of jobs and purpose, is backdrop and not the pulsing heart of this story. In other words, I thought that this would have that something extra that Nick Drnaso’s ‘Sabrina’ lacked. However, my anticipation of a novel that speaks to the great frustration and rage amongst the working class was thwarted.
What I got instead, and I don’t know how else to put this, was the whitest book I’d read in a long time. For a while after that, I couldn’t stop telling people just how glaring the lack of diversity felt! It may be because it’s 2023 or the kind of fiction that I now appreciate, but the book seemed extremely out-of-touch with reality. Despite that, I’ll confess (and the power of confession/redemption is a strong theme throughout the book) that it had many staples of small town life. To the writer’s credit, these are wrought masterfully, with characters so alive that they jump off the page and will remain far more memorable to me than characters from other Pulitzer winners that I have loved better but remember less, such as [b: Olive Kitteridge|57765917|Olive Kitteridge|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618687907l/57765917._SY75_.jpg|3263906].
Russo draws out their internal conflicts, their softness, shows us how they became who they are. So, while you’re bound to empathise with the do-gooder protagonist Miles Roby, he also makes you pity the unlikable characters of Jimmy Minty and John Voss. I use the word pity in the Biblical sense, as an extension of grace, because the book is unquestionably a meditation on Christian values, if not overtly so. To me, the denouement was unearned in the narrative, but by going there, Russo enables conversation on poverty and disaffection in the US heartland. This is apart from all the nuggets of wisdom you’ll find about marriage, family, love, resisting passivity and defying inertia. Most of all, the book is about crawling out of a quagmire of disappointment and missed opportunities. This particular passage hit home, and how:
“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.”
My displeasure with this book is the fault of my expectations. I went into this expecting an indictment of capitalism, a realisation of Luddite fears, a portrait of a hollowed-out middle America that has crumbled under the enormous weight of globalist greed. But the town of Empire Falls, with its empty shell of a factory, once the provider of jobs and purpose, is backdrop and not the pulsing heart of this story. In other words, I thought that this would have that something extra that Nick Drnaso’s ‘Sabrina’ lacked. However, my anticipation of a novel that speaks to the great frustration and rage amongst the working class was thwarted.
What I got instead, and I don’t know how else to put this, was the whitest book I’d read in a long time. For a while after that, I couldn’t stop telling people just how glaring the lack of diversity felt! It may be because it’s 2023 or the kind of fiction that I now appreciate, but the book seemed extremely out-of-touch with reality. Despite that, I’ll confess (and the power of confession/redemption is a strong theme throughout the book) that it had many staples of small town life. To the writer’s credit, these are wrought masterfully, with characters so alive that they jump off the page and will remain far more memorable to me than characters from other Pulitzer winners that I have loved better but remember less, such as [b: Olive Kitteridge|57765917|Olive Kitteridge|Elizabeth Strout|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1618687907l/57765917._SY75_.jpg|3263906].
Russo draws out their internal conflicts, their softness, shows us how they became who they are. So, while you’re bound to empathise with the do-gooder protagonist Miles Roby, he also makes you pity the unlikable characters of Jimmy Minty and John Voss. I use the word pity in the Biblical sense, as an extension of grace, because the book is unquestionably a meditation on Christian values, if not overtly so. To me, the denouement was unearned in the narrative, but by going there, Russo enables conversation on poverty and disaffection in the US heartland. This is apart from all the nuggets of wisdom you’ll find about marriage, family, love, resisting passivity and defying inertia. Most of all, the book is about crawling out of a quagmire of disappointment and missed opportunities. This particular passage hit home, and how:
“He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to fuck up again.”