The town of Empire Falls in Dexter County, Maine, has seen better days. For decades, in fact, it has gone from bad to worse. Its logging and textile enterprises have gone belly-up, and the once vast holdings of the Whiting clan now mostly amount to decrepit real estate. Miles Roby gazes over this ruined kingdom from the Empire Grill, a youthful opportunity that has become the albatross of his life. A decent man encircled by history and dreams, by echoing churches and abandoned mills, by the comforts and feuds provided by lifelong friends, Miles is also a patient, knowing guide to the hardscrabble nature of Empire Falls.
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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
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