His fitness-crazed wife has filed for divorce, with loud revelations about his various inadequacies. Along with her maniacal cat, she has long nursed an interest in him, expressed in acts of generosity laced with an aftertaste of poison.Īt 42, Miles finds himself stuck in a greasy spoon, “haunted by a profound feeling of personal failure.” Whiting shows no sign of ever loosening her grasp on life or the town or Miles. Like everything else, it’s owned by the Whiting matriarch, but Miles clings to a vague promise that he’ll inherit the dilapidated restaurant when the time comes.īut time has come and gone in Empire Falls, and old Mrs.

Twenty years ago, against his dying mother’s wishes, he dropped out of college to care for her and manage the Empire Grill. One of those cowed citizens is Miles Roby, whose reflexive patience frustrates even the friends and relatives who adore him. But the Whiting family still owns the industrial husks, the river frontage, most of the town’s buildings, and the tired souls of its inhabitants. The mills that caused Empire Falls, Maine, to mushroom during the last half of the 19th century have long since closed in this carefully drawn novel. It captures the interplay of past and present, comedy and tragedy, nation and individual in the tradition of America’s greatest books.

His newly released Empire Falls holds the fading culture of small-town life in a light that’s both illuminating and searing. The history of American literature may show that Richard Russo wrote the last great novel of the 20th century.

Empire falls book review