“Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice.”
Richard Russo said that his celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Empire Falls was borne out of a feeling of “parental dread.” At the time, his two daughters were getting older and becoming more independent and private in their lives, which led Russo to write about the myriad problems facing young people in contemporary American culture. Typically, Russo’s fiction often explores themes of “place, character, and class,” as he explained in a recent PBS Newshour interview, particularly former industrial towns situated around the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York like his hometown of Gloversville. However, his novel Empire Falls takes place in a fictional central Maine community aptly called “Empire Falls” (in Dexter County), a once-prosperous mill-town along the Knox River that has steadily fallen into post-industrial decay. Like many towns across America over the past half-century or so, its denizens feel trapped, isolated, and left behind.
But the town of Empire Falls is not completely devoid of hope. It has a storied history dominated by a wealthy family known as the Whitings who own all the property in the area. The most recent Whiting patriarch was Charles Beaumont Whiting (or “C.B. Whiting”). His father was Honus Whiting and his father before him was Elijah Whiting and so on. The Whiting men can trace their lineage back to the days when the region boasted a successful logging business, before the rise of textile mills, but then the mid-century economy hit and the mills were all closed down and the businesses moved overseas. Along the way, the Whitings grew wealthy, thanks in part to buying up all the riverfront real estate and resisting the formation of unions in their businesses and so on, while the rest of the citizens either moved away or fell into cheap work to survive. But the Whitings have remained steadfast in their rule over Empire Falls, some of them have even sought to control the forces of nature. For example, frustrated by the lousy Knox River which dumped everything from trash and animal carcasses onto his riverfront property, C.B. Whiting undertook a unique dynamite project, hoping to shift the flow of the river and spare his property. Rearranging the river’s current allowed him to shore up his already sizable property and avoid all the washed up refuse. Like many American captains of industry, C.B. Whiting believes there will be no consequences to controlling the forces of nature. Indeed, the power and influence of the Whitings seems to know no bounds. But at the same time the Whiting men all seem to have been afflicted with a personal curse: they tend to marry women who make their lives miserable. And C.B. Whiting was no exception to this trend. He grew so troubled and hopeless in his marriage that he eventually shot himself in the head, leaving behind a disabled daughter and a shrewd businesswoman of a wife who now quietly directs everything happening in Empire Falls.
But the novel centers on Miles Roby, long-time proprietor of a local eatery called the Empire Grill. He hopes to be its eventual owner, but of course, it is actually the property C.B. Whiting’s elderly widow, Francine Whiting (née Robideaux) and she does not want Miles to do anything aside from flipping burgers at the grill. Throughout the novel, Mrs. Whiting serves as a Miss Havesham to Miles’s Pip, a slightly tormenting maternal figure who always seems to be thwarting his plans from the shadows. Her mantra is “power and control.” We also learn about other characters in Miles’s family, such as his beloved daughter who goes by the nickname “Tick” (she is a sophomore in high school), along with his vainglorious soon-to-be-ex-wife Janine who is currently engaged to a sleazebag fitness club-owner named Walt Comeau (“The Silver Fox”). She feels sexually liberated by Walt, despite him being a comical figure who is actually quite a bit older and less wealthy than he is letting on. And there is Miles’s drunken foolhardy father Max (who firmly believes that the Robys and the Robideaux’s can trade their lineage back to one another), and Miles’s late mother Grace who tragically died of cancer years ago. Even with the passage of time, Miles is still wracked with Catholic guilt over his mother’s passing. It was always his mother’s hope that Miles would go off to college and escape the drudgery of life in Empire Falls, and while he did attend a catholic college for a spell, he sadly never graduated and wound up right back in Empire Falls under the thumb of Mrs. Francine Whiting. And now Miles is stuck.
Throughout the novel, we meet a cast of other secondary characters like Miles’s brother David, who once suffered a brutal drunk driving accident and is now rumored to be growing marijuana, as well as an attractive large-breasted waitress at the Empire Grill named Charlene (whom Miles has had a crush for years but she has been secretly having a fling with his brother David). There is also Jimmy Minty, Miles’s old acquaintance and a badgersome local policeman whose petulant son, Zach, was recently dumped by Miles’s daughter Tick. The break-up has caused plenty of friction between them, but now Tick hopes for a new long-distance relationship with a boy named Donny she met in Massachusetts during one of their family trips to Martha’s Vineyard. We also meet Father Mark of St. Catherine’s Church (“St. Cat’s”) as well as the declining elderly cantankerous Father Tom, and the retiring Police Chief Daws (who has been diagnosed with cancer), in addition to a group of kids at Tick’s high school, like her friend Candace Burke and a quiet, troubled boy named John Voss who is relentlessly bullied by the likes of Zach Minty. John Voss has a vacant, hopeless look about him and he seems unfazed when playing Russian roulette with the other boys. Principal Meyer asks Tick to befriend John to help him better acclimate to the school, and Miles even hires the boy at the Empire Grill, but still something about John leaves Tick feeling uncomfortable (people in town say he “looks like a damn serial killer”). Nevertheless, Tick manages to have some pleasant conversations with John, including questions about his dreams, and at the same time, some of his troubled past comes to light, including his drug-addled parents who treated him horridly, sometimes left him enclosed inside a laundry bag and stuffing him in a closet. The parental abuse led him to come under the care of his elderly grandmother who lives in Empire Falls.
While the plot of Empire Falls is mostly threadbare for approximately two-thirds of the novel, we are treated to a rich character study of people stuck in a declining region, talking about their problems in various scenes, from the old church to the Empire Grill, as well as a bar known as Callahan’s (where Janine’s mother Bea works), a homecoming football game, and the school, which is overseen by Miles’s old friend Principal Otto Meyer, Jr. Meanwhile, Francine Whiting conducts her machinations from the old Whiting Mansion where her crippled adult daughter Cindy Whiting now lives. Cindy once suffered an accident, she was the victim of a hit-and-run when she was three years old and the accident has left her permanently disabled. Cindy has been in love with Miles for years, and while Miles has often pitied her, he has never returned her affections.
Through and through, Miles is a good man. He loves his daughter and refuses to stand in the way of his wife’s newly-planned nuptials. He even offers to paint the church for free. But when he tries to acquire a liquor license for the Empire Grill and go into business at Callahan’s, he is easily outmaneuvered by the wily old Mrs. Whiting who refuses to let Miles work anywhere aside from the Empire Grill. Then through a series of flashbacks, we learn about Miles’s past, where we are painted a picture of his deep affection for his mother. Miles recalls a trip he took with her to Martha’s Vineyard when he was young and they met a strange man named “Charlie Mayne.” Charlie seemed to know his mother and they spent a few days together. Miles even spotted his mother sneaking around at night with Charlie. Despite being young, Miles knew he must keep this affair secret from his father who was locked up at the time for being a “public nuisance.”
However, returning to the present, Miles happens to notice an old newspaper photograph and he suddenly connects the dots. His mother Grace was actually having an affair with the town patriarch C.B. Whiting, and Miles was briefly exposed to this affair. But their love had to be cut-off, leading C.B. Whiting to flee to Mexico for several years while Miles’s mother Grace was left to make amends with Charlie’s wife (Mrs. Francine Whiting). Grace worked for her for years before sadly succumbing to cancer. This shadowy story from Miles’s past seems to explain why Mrs. Whiting is so keenly interested in keeping him trapped in Empire Falls –it is retribution for his late mother’s infidelity. Meanwhile, strange things start happening at school for Tick, including the extended disappearance of the troubled boy John Voss. An inspection inside his grandmother’s dilapidated vacant house reveals that his grandmother has actually been dead for some time and none of the bills have been paid. John Voss is nowhere to be found but his grandmother’s skeleton is later discovered in the landfill (along with several deceased dogs who have apparently been tortured). This is all very concerning to the townsfolk (as explained to Miles by Police Chief Daws). And in another flashback, we learn the truth about Cindy Whiting’s injury. As it turns out, her father C.B. Whiting was traveling home to Empire Falls from Mexico with plans to kill his wife when he accidentally ran over his little three-year-old daughter Cindy with his car, leading her to suffer her lifelong disability.
The novel then comes to a head when Miles finally snaps and physically confronts Walt Comeau (whom his ex-wife has recently married after the divorce with Miles has been finalized) and Miles punches the loathsome policeman Jimmy Minty. Miles is irate at his lot in life amidst all these pesky loathsome people. But before Miles can officially be hauled off to jail, a shocking plot twist occurs. John Voss unexpectedly resurfaces at school. He brandishes a revolver and begins shooting random people in the classroom, first killing a boy named Justin Dibble and then the teacher Doris Rodrigue, before severely wounding Candace Burke and then turning the gun on Tick. He looks her straight in the eye and says, “This is my dream” but when he fires, she is saved by none other than Principal Otto Meyer, jr. who steps in front of the gun and is tragically killed.
Miles and the police rush over to the school where Miles is granted permission to rescue his completely traumatized daughter Tick. He scoops her up and drives her off to Martha’s Vineyard where they hide out for the next six months or so. Eventually, Miles’s father, fresh off a minor lottery winning, tracks them down on the island. Meanwhile, Miles is haunted by his ghostly memories of “Charlie Mayne,” or C.B. Whiting, who speaks with Miles and blames him for the failed love affair with his mother all those years ago. Miles is pained by the guilt of his own existence. He receives messages from his brother back in Empire Falls who explains that Jimmy Minty has been arrested for stealing various items, and as Miles prepares to bring Tick back to Empire Falls, he speaks with his ex-wife Janine who is now estranged from her new husband Walt Comeau. John Voss has been placed inside a mental facility, having been found incompetent to stand trial. Also, Cindy Whiting tells Miles she is leaving Empire Falls to be with an unknown lover and, lastly, Miles learns about recent storms and heavy flooding in Empire Falls, causing the Knox River to overflow, leaving parts of the town completely underwater. As it turns out, the elderly Mrs. Whiting was standing outside in her gazebo when she was suddenly swept away by the rushing waters and she drowned. In the end, it was actually the late C.B. Whiting’s dynamite projects that left the house vulnerable to dangerous flooding. Thus, C.B. Whiting managed to break the Whiting curse after all by indirectly killing his own wife.
Partly inspired by the horrific and uniquely American phenomenon of school shootings (now occurring in exponentially higher numbers than any other country in the world), Richard Russo’s Empire Falls draws upon the then-recent Heath High School shooting in West Paducah, Kentucky (1997) and the notorious Columbine High School massacre in Colorado (1999). Today, some twenty years after Empire Falls was first published, the United States has documented thousands of incidents over the past decade alone, far more than every other industrial country combined. The tragedy belongs to us and our children as we continue to avoid addressing this urgent problem. Even as I write this review, yet another school shooting has come and gone through the news cycle (a teenager opened fire at a school in Bend, Oregon killing three children and a teacher). This creeping sense of nihilism among teenagers, combined with the United States’s ludicrously easy access to firearms, has led to any number of John Voss’s roaming about in towns across the country and it offers a searing indictment on the state of American society. This trend is exacerbated by the hopelessness and decay post-industrial towns experiencing an outflow of jobs, the closure of factories, inflow of drugs, rising poverty, and the departure of educated middle-class families. Perhaps this is truly what it looks like when an “empire falls,” so to speak.
Somewhat surprisingly to me, Empire Falls continues to be a highly lauded novel, ranked among the best of the twenty-first century. It seems to enjoy near universal acclaim and while I was drawn to its unique study of eccentric characters and locales, admittedly I struggled with the first two-thirds or so of this novel. I found myself often wandering through various scenes, feeling listless and impatient, eager for something to happen, and it forced me to keep asking myself: “What exactly is at stake here?” The plot is light but the characters are rich, and in the end, the pay-off is satisfying, but I just found Empire Falls to be a real slog early on. Perhaps I’m an unsophisticated reviewer of contemporary literary fiction, but I would, no doubt, benefit from a re-read of this again in the future.
Notable Quotations:
“Compared to the Whiting mansion in town, the house Charles Beaumont Whiting built a decade after his return to Maine was modest” (opening line).
“As the town mushroomed during the last half of the nineteenth century, the Whiting estate gradually was surrounded by the homes of mill workers, and of late the attitude of the people doing the surrounding seemed increasingly resentful” (5).
“The message the river had been whispering to him as he knelt there all afternoon was a single word of invitation. ‘Come,’ the water burbled, unmistakable now. ‘Come… come… come…’” (11).
“Fully cognizant of his family history, C.B. had been understandably wary of matrimony. From time to time his father would remind him that he would have need of an heir, but then C.B. regarded his father and grandfather and wasn’t so sure. Why not put an end to the awful cycle of misery right there? What was the purpose of producing more Whiting males if they were predestined to lives of marital torment?” (14-15).
“Just beyond the factory and mill ran the river that long ago had powered them, and Miles often wondered if these old buildings were razed, would the town that had grown up around them be forced to imagine a future? Perhaps not. Nothing but a chain-link fence had gone up in place of the Rexall, which meant, Miles supposed, that diverting one’s attention from the past was not the same as envisioning and embarking upon a future. On the other hand, if the past were razed, the slate wiped clean, maybe fewer people would confuse it with the future, and that at least would be something. For as long as the mill and factory remained, Miles feared, many would continue to believe against all reason that a buyer might be found for one or both, and that consequently Empire Falls would be restored to its old economic viability” (19-20).
“Odd, though, the way other people saw you. Miles had always thought of himself as a model of tolerance” (43).
“…he [Miles] did prefer the notion of an all-loving God to that of an all-knowing one. It pleased him to imagine God as someone like his mother, someone beleaguered by too many responsibilities, too dog-tired to monitor an energetic boy every minute of the day, but who, out of love and fear for his safety, checked in on him whenever she could. Was this so crazy?” (45).
“One of the great unsolved mysteries of the universe, Miles had long believed, was what women found attractive about certain men. Apparently, women all over the world wanted to have sex with Mick Jagger, or at least had wanted to once upon a time. Others had not found Max Roby repulsive. Miles couldn’t help admiring women for their ability to dismiss the evidence of their senses. If that’s what explained it. If it wasn’t simply that from time to time they were unaccountably drawn to the grotesque” (85).
“…it occurred to Miles that they made a couple in some strange way that Grace and his father did not” (140).
“‘I lied, Miles,’ she told him, tears starting to spill now. ‘I’m not sorry about your divorce. It gives me a thread of hope… I still love you, Miles. You see that, don’t you? It’s the one thing the lithium can’t touch. Did you know that? The drugs wash into your brain and make things easier to bear, but they can’t touch your heart! They can’t alter what’s already there, Miles’” (159-160).
“Lives are rivers. We imagine we can direct their paths, though in the end there’s but one destination, and we end up being true to ourselves only because we have no choice” (163, Mrs. Whiting speaking to Miles).
“One of the odd things about middle age, he concluded, was the strange decisions a man discovers he’s made by not really making them” (261).
“Down below, the Fairhaven and Empire Fals players were trotting back onto the field, halftime over. Janine did her best to act interested and upbeat, yet she couldn’t help thinking how soon these limber cheerleaders, now doing back flips, would be married and then pregnant by these same boys or others like them a town or two away. And how swiftly life would descend on the boys, as well. First the panic that maybe they’d have to go through it alone, then the quick marriage to prevent that grim fate, followed by relentless house and car payments and doctors’ bills and all the rest. The joy they took in this rough sport would gradually mutate. They’d gravitate to bars like her mother’s to get away from these same girls and then the children neither they nor their wives would be clever and independent enough to prevent. There would be the sports channel on the tavern’s wide-screen TV and plenty of beer, and, for a while they’d talk about playing again, but when they did play, they’d injure themselves and before long those injuries would become “conditions,” and that would be that. Their jobs, their marriages, their kids, their lives –all of it a grind. Once a year, feeling rambunctious, they’d paint their faces, pile into one of their wives’ minivans and, even though it cost too much, head south to take in a Patriots game, if the team didn’t finally relocate somewhere to the south where all the decent jobs had gone. After the game, half drunk, they’d head home again because nobody had the money to stay overnight. Home to Empire Falls, if such a place still existed” (277-278).
“Sunday afternoons during the NFL season were almost enough to restore a person’s faith in the bar business” (332).
“‘How come you never told me about Mom and Charlie Whiting, Dad?’… Max reacted as if he’d been expecting the question for years. ‘How come you ever told me, son?’” (373).
“And anyway, never mind about not knowing who’s next door. Half the time you don’t even know who you’re marrying until you go to pick up your license and happen to see by pure chance how old the fucker really is. Then –talk about your secrets—just when you think you’ve straightened out the whole age thing and go ahead and marry the old fart anyway, against your better judgment, plus the advice of everybody you know, then you go to the bank and try to write a check on your joint account –and whammo! There you are, wondering all over again, just who is this son of a bitch anyway?” (415).
“What if all everybody needed in the world was to be sure of one friend? What if you were the one, and you refused to say those simple words?” (440).
“What she realizes when he enters, a sixteen-year-old boy with a grocery bag folded under his arm, is how relieved she’d been by his disappearance” (445).
“This is what I dream” (447, the words John Voss speaks to Tick before firing his gun).
“He didn’t expect anybody to share his resentment about the way it was coming about, that once again the lion’s share of the wealth generated would never reach the citizens of Empire Falls. The houses they couldn’t afford to sell last year would be houses they couldn’t afford to buy the next. And it was Francine Whiting, of course, who’d pulled it off, in essence selling the same thing twice, first the mills themselves then the parcels of riverfront land she’d cleverly retained. And, too, there was an irrational feeling he couldn’t quite dismiss, that all of this new hope and confidence was built on the foundation of a loss everyone was far too anxious to forget. His friend Otto Meyer was a large part of that loss, and the dead boy, Justin Dibble, and, yes, even Doris Roderigue. If Candace Burke survived, perhaps a few years down the road she’d be grateful for a job doing phone solicitation for the credit-card people, a job she could handle from her wheelchair. And there was John Voss, now returned, in a sense, to the dark closet he’d been forgotten in as a child –a loss no one would ever wish to recall” (462).
“…seeing Tick alive and well was enough to confirm his sense that his best destiny in life was as this child’s father” (469).
On the 2002 Pulitzer Prize Decision:
The 2002 Pulitzer fiction jury consisted of the following three members:
- Chair: Nancy Huddleston Packer (1925-2025) was a short story and memoir writer, who won two O. Henry Awards and was awarded a fellowship at Stanford University’s creative writing center for (1959-1960), studying under Wallace Stegner and alongside writers like Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry, before joining the faculty in 1961 as a professor of English and creative writing. She began her full-time teaching career at Stanford after Philip Roth suddenly opted out. She later directed the creative writing program at Stanford and served as the Melvin and Bill Lane Professor in the Humanities. She taught the likes of Michael Cunningham (a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner) and she served as chair of the Pulitzer fiction jury in 2002. She retired from Stanford in 1993. Her father was Alabama congressman George Huddleston. She had graduated from Birmingham–Southern College in 1945 and earned a master’s degree in theology from the University of Chicago in 1947. Nancy Huddleston Packer was married to Herbert L. Packer, a law professor and criminologist at Stanford who died in 1973 (he committed suicide after suffering a stroke that left him paralyzed in 1969). They had two children together, both writers, Ann Packer and George Packer. Nancy Huddleston Packer died of Alzheimer’s Disease in April 2025 at the age of 99.
- Frederic Tuten (1936-present) is an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. He was born in the Bronx and received his undergraduate degree from City College of New York as well as his PhD in 19th-century American literature from New York University (with a concentration on Melville, Whitman, and James Fenimore Cooper). He taught literature and American cinema in France and spent 15 years co-founding and leading the graduate program in creative writing at the City College of New York. Tuten also worked as an art and film critic for various publications, such as The New York Times. He has written five novels one book of inter-related short stories as well as collections of nonfiction and a memoir. He has received numerous accolades, including four Pushcart Prizes, an O. Henry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship for Creative Writing, and the Award for Distinguished Writing from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been married twice and is a longtime resident of Manhattan’s East Village.
- John Leonard (1939-2008) was a prominent and prolific literary and cultural critic who wrote for varied publications such as The National Review, The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Esquire, Playboy, Penthouse, Vanity Fair, TV Guide, Ms. Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Newsweek, The New Statesman, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The Washington Post Book World, Salon. critic For Life magazine and The New York Times, he wrote under the pen name Cyclops. He hosted GBH’s First Edition, and reviewed books, TV and movies on CBS Sunday Morning for 16 years. Leonard taught creative writing and criticism at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. Leonard was co-literary editor of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard, from 1995 to 1998. Leonard died on November 5, 2008, of lung cancer, aged 69. He had two children from his first marriage and also a stepchild.
The other two nominees in 2002 were: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (which won the National Book Award) and John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead (who later became a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys).
The 2002 fiction jury report was sent to Seymour Topping on December 29, 2001 and signed by the three jury members. The jury’s three nominees were listed alphabetically by author’s last name with a paragraph summary of each selection. I have faithfully copied the jury’s write-up on Empire Falls below:
“Not since Winesburg, Ohio has a small town given us such a profound view of American life as does the eponymous site of Richard Russo’s novel. Empire Falls is a deeply moving story of class, gender, family, power, and vengeance. The central conflict is between the intelligent, dutiful Miles Roby, and his employer Francine Whiting, the town’s most powerful person. In a decades’-long revenge, Mrs. Whiting keeps Roby in a state of dependence bordering on servitude. As this conflict works toward a most satisfying conclusion, we meet a marvelously portrayed cast of characters, notably Roby’s deadbeat father, a supercilious owner of a health spa, the murderous boy Roby’s teen-aged daughter attempts to befriend, and a dozen minor characters that are never stereotypes and always full of life. By turns affectionate, humorous, and passionate, Empire Falls provides insights into American culture far beyond the town limits.”
Presumably it was based on this jury summary that the Pulitzer Board decided to select Empire Falls over either The Corrections or John Henry Days. Per usual, if anyone has any insider knowledge on what might have transpired during discussions among the Pulitzer Board in 2002, please feel free to let me know!
After winning the Pulitzer Prize, Richard Russo described the day of the announcement as follows:
“I’m remembering the year Empire Falls won the Pulitzer (2002), I was sure it had no chance. The day the prize was to be announced I did the sensible thing: instead of sitting around waiting for the phone to ring when it clearly wasn’t going to, I went out and played tennis with a friend. The match went long, and when I returned home, Barbara, my wife, hurried out onto the porch to greet me. One look at her stricken face and I knew that either someone had died, or that the phone had indeed rung. Had been ringing for the last forty-five minutes, in fact.”
Note: 2026 marks the 25th anniversary since Empire Falls was first published!
Who is Richard Russo?
Richard Russo (1949-present) was born in Johnstown, New York, and raised in Gloversville, once the central hub of the U.S. glove-making industry in the early 20th century before it collapsed around the 1960s. He lived in a house with his mother and grandparents. When he was young, his parents divorced. His ne’er-do-well, bar-hopping, gambling father worked in highway construction and his mother was known to be a fiercely independent and deeply anxious woman who was sometimes prone to manic episodes and fits of OCD (she apparently coped with the trials of life and motherhood by taking barbiturates). In the December 2012 edition of The Brooklyn Rail, Greg Ryan reviewed Russo’s memoir Elsewhere and likened Russo’s mother more to the Empire Falls character Grace Roby than Francine Whiting.
At any rate, Russo earned a bachelor’s, MFA, and PhD from the University of Arizona (graduating in 1979). His mother, eager to escape the drudgery of Gloversville, drove across the country with him to Tucson in his car nicknamed “Gray Death.” The subject of his doctoral dissertation was on the works of Charles Brockden Brown, the early American writer, historian, and editor. He then taught English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (where he published his first novel Mohawk) and later Colby College. He retired from teaching in 1996 to pursue writing full-time. To date, he has published eleven novels, four short story collections, four nonfiction works (including two memoirs). For many years he has lived and worked in Maine but many of his stories are set amidst the industrial decline of the mountain towns in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.
In addition to Empire Falls being made into an HBO miniseries starring Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Newman among other major actors, Russo’s novel Nobody’s Fool, was also made into an Oscar-nominated movie starring Paul Newman, Jessica Tandy, and Melanie Griffith.
Russo reportedly lives on the coast of Maine with his wife, Barbara. They have been married for some fifty years and have two adult daughters, one of whom (Emily) co-owns a bookstore in Portland, Maine called “Print: A Bookstore” and the other of whom is a writer and artist (Kate). Today, Richard Russo is often highly regarded as a sage-like voice of humor and wisdom, writing about the struggling working-classes and the forgotten industrial towns of America. On a personal level, he has been highly praised for being a kind, decent person and a fundamentally good-natured family man by everyone from his literary agent, Nat Sobel, to fellow writer, Ann Patchett.
Film Adaptations:
- “Empire Falls,” a two-part HBO miniseries (2005)
- Directed by: Fred Schepisi
- Starring: Ed Harris, Helen Hunt, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dennis Farina, Joanne Woodward, and Paul Newman (this was his last live action role).
- I watched the HBO miniseries and I can report that it was satisfactory enough, though it felt a bit more like a daytime television soap opera, despite its impressive star-studded cast.
Further Reading:
- Mohawk (1986)
- Nobody’s Fool (1993)
- Straight Man (1997)
- Bridge of Sighs (2007)
Literary Context 2001-2002
- 2001 Nobel Prize Winner: awarded to Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.”
- 2001 National Book Award Winner: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
- 2001 Booker Prize Winner: True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey
- Two major films were released based on top-selling fantasy novels: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
- Bestselling novelist Michael Crichton signed a new deal with HarperCollins Publishers reportedly valued at $40 million for two books.
- Raymond Benson published his next James Bond continuation novel Never Dream of Dying.
- Neil Gaiman published American Gods.
- James Ellroy published The Cold Six Thousand.
- John Grisham published A Painted House and Skipping Christmas.
- Diana Gabaldon published the fifth book in the Outlander series entitled The Fiery Cross.
- P. D. James published Death in Holy Orders.
- Stephen King published Black House and Dreamcatcher.
- John le Carré published The Constant Gardener.
- Ursula K. Le Guin published The Birthday of the World, and Other Stories.
- Mario Vargas Llosa published The Feast of the Goat (La fiesta del chivo).
- James Luceno published another Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Cloak of Deception.
- Ian McEwan published Atonement.
- Yann Martel published Life of Pi.
- Alice Munro published Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (short stories).
- V.S. Naipaul published Half a Life.
- Joyce Carol Oates published Middle Age: A Romance.
- Chuck Palahniuk published Choke.
- Salman Rushdie published Fury.
- Amy Tan published The Bonesetter’s Daughter.
- Sue Monk Kidd published The Secret Life of Bees.
- Carlos Ruiz Zafón published The Shadow of the Wind.
- Dan Brown published Deception Point.
- Ann Brashares published The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.
- Eoin Colfer published the first Artemis Fowl book.
- Ann Patchett published Bel Canto.
- W. G. Sebald published Austerlitz.
Did the Right Book Win?
2001 was a remarkable year for literature, with the publication of novels like Ian McEwan’s Atonement (which would not have been eligible for the Pulitzer Prize) and others like Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections (which was a Pulitzer finalist and won the National Book Award). Yet Richard Russo’s Empire Falls stands out as an extraordinary study of people and place, focusing on America’s forgotten industrial basr where abandoned factories and mills litter the region. Hopelessness sets in (intimately connected to our present political moment of populist backlash). The sense of being trapped by circumstances and feeling hopeless in small town America is palpable in Empire Falls. And while I found the first two-thirds or so of the novel to be a mostly plotless slog to get through, the novel does feature a panoply of richly imagined characters and the pay-off in the end is indeed satisfying. Empire Falls remains a highly praised novel, even 25 years after its initial publication, with many readers ranking it among the best of the Pulitzer Prize winners. I hesitate to admit that my somewhat mixed opinion has led me to question my own view of the novel, wondering whether or not I failed to see something in its merits, but I have a sneaking suspicion this one might improve for me upon a future re-read if I ever decide to do so again.
Russo, Richard. Empire Falls. Vintage Contemporaries, Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, New York, 2001.
Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize winners.