Empire Falls

The Grill

Miles Roby has managed the Empire Grill his whole adult life. He did not plan to. The plan — which his mother had for him — was to get out of Empire Falls, get educated, come back and do something better. The plan was interrupted by his wife Janine’s pregnancy and by the complicated loyalty he feels to the Grill’s owner, the widow Francine Whiting, who seems to be dangling the restaurant as a future inheritance.

The town of Empire Falls is the old mill town it sounds like: the mill is mostly closed, the shops on Main Street are mostly empty, the young people are mostly gone. The people who remain are the ones who couldn’t leave or didn’t want to.

Miles

Russo’s gift is for male characters of a specific kind: decent, patient, unable to advocate for themselves, waiting for justice that is not going to come. Miles is the perfection of this type. He is aware of his own passivity and unable to overcome it. He is a good father to his daughter Tick, a bad husband to Janine, and a good son to a mother who died young and devoted to his interests.

The novel’s ending introduces a sudden violence that changes the tone of everything. Some critics found this jarring; others found it the only appropriate conclusion to a novel about a community where the pressure has been building for decades. Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Empire Falls apart: The portrait of Empire Falls itself — the mill, the river, the closing shops — is as precise as any American regional fiction; Miles Roby’s patient, defeated goodness is rendered with genuine sympathy rather than condescension; and The secondary characters are fully realised — the town feels populated, not staged. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Empire Falls give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Deindustrialisation destroys communities in slow motion, and the damage is most visible in the people who stay. Waiting for life to sort itself out is a life choice — passivity is not the absence of agency but a specific exercise of it. The paternalist employer who owns the town is not a character from the 19th century but a persistent figure in American small-town life. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Richard Russo’s prose in Empire Falls is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The pace is deliberately unhurried in ways that require patience from readers wanting conventional plot momentum. The ending’s sudden violence arrives in a way that some readers find incompatible with the novel’s preceding register. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of American regional fiction who want the finest portrait of a post-industrial New England town, and Pulitzer-hunters who want a worthy winner.

The Pulitzer Prize

Empire Falls was published in 2001 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002. The novel is set in Empire Falls, Maine — a former mill town whose textile factory closed decades ago, leaving the community in the slow decline that Russo documents with the sociological precision of someone who grew up in a similar environment in upstate New York. Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill, owned by Francine Whiting, the widow of the mill owner’s son; the novel is a portrait of a man who has deferred his own life in service to a place and a person who have given him very little in return.

The HBO Adaptation

Empire Falls was adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2005, directed by Fred Schepisi, with Ed Harris as Miles, Helen Hunt as Janine, and Paul Newman in the Pulitzer-winning role of Max Roby, Miles’s shiftless and charming father. Newman’s performance was widely praised as one of the best of his later career, and the production received multiple Emmy nominations. Russo adapted his own novel for the screen, a choice that allowed him to maintain the social texture of the small-town setting — the bowling alley, the diner, the high school — that is structural to the novel’s meaning and that adaptation often discards in favour of plot efficiency.

Pulitzer Prize and HBO Adaptation

Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002. Richard Russo adapted it for a 2005 HBO miniseries starring Ed Harris and Paul Newman, with Newman winning the Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor — his final award before his death in 2008. The miniseries brought the novel to a broad audience and is considered one of the more faithful recent American television adaptations of a literary novel.

Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002; the 2005 HBO miniseries starred Ed Harris as Miles Roby, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward as Max and Grace Roby’s generation, with William Monahan’s screenplay. Newman and Woodward received Emmy Award nominations. Russo has described the novel as his most personal, drawing on his upbringing in a declining upstate New York mill town.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Russo’s masterpiece and one of the great American regional novels — the portrait of a dying mill town is precise and affectionate, and Miles’s patient, self-defeating goodness is one of American fiction’s most compelling portraits of a certain kind of man.

Reading Guides

• Where to Start with Richard Russo