Where to Start with Richard Russo: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Richard Russo — how to approach Empire Falls, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of a man managing a diner in a dying Maine mill town, waiting for life to sort itself out while the town empties around him. A complete reading guide.
Richard Russo (born 1949 in Johnstown, New York) is an American novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter whose work is set primarily in small mill towns in the northeastern United States — towns like the one he grew up in, which lost their industrial purpose in the decades following World War II. He is the author of eight novels, of which Empire Falls (2001) is the most widely celebrated, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2002. He also wrote the screenplay for Nobody’s Fool (1994) and Empire Falls (2005), both of which were adapted for screen. He taught for many years before the success of his fiction allowed him to write full-time.
Where to Start: Empire Falls (2001)
Russo built Empire Falls around a dying mill town in Maine and a protagonist too decent to leave it — a novel that earned the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for its precision about the texture of economic decline in post-industrial America. Empire Falls opens with a brief history of the town: how the textile mill came, how it flourished, how the Whiting family acquired it, and how Francine Whiting still controls everything in a town whose mills have been closed for decades. The history is told with the precision of someone who has watched exactly this process in other towns, and it establishes the novel’s central concern before Miles Roby is even introduced: what happens to the people who stay in a place after the reason for the place has left?
Miles Roby is Russo’s most fully realised portrait of a particular American type: the decent man who has confused accommodation with virtue. Miles is genuinely good — patient with his difficult ex-wife, protective of his daughter, loyal to his employees, honest in his dealings with Mrs. Whiting — and his goodness is also his problem. He has been waiting for things to resolve themselves for so long that waiting has become his mode of being. The novel is interested in what it costs to be a good man in a specific way — the specific cost of patience as a life strategy — without being unsympathetic to Miles’s goodness or to the circumstances that shaped it.
The town itself is as fully realised as any character. Russo maps Empire Falls with the intimacy of a writer who has spent years thinking about how these places work: the social hierarchies that persist after the economic rationale for them has collapsed, the way the mill’s absence continues to organise the town’s identity, the specific relationships between the old money that owns things and the people who work for it. Mrs. Whiting — the widow who owns the town and dispenses or withholds patronage according to private logic — is a figure who would seem archaic in a novel set anywhere else but is entirely plausible in this specific town.
The secondary characters fill the town convincingly: Miles’s father Max, an itinerant painter with an irresponsible charm; David, his brother and restaurant partner; the various regulars of the Empire Grill whose rhythms constitute the texture of small-town daily life. The violence at the novel’s end arrives from outside this texture, from a direction the town had not been attending to — which is part of Russo’s point.
Reading Richard Russo
Empire Falls is Russo’s essential novel. Nobody’s Fool (1993) is the natural companion — equally funny, equally rooted in working-class New England, and featuring the irresistible Sully Sullivan.
For the full Richard Russo bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Richard Russo author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Richard Russo?
Empire Falls (2001) is Russo's essential novel — the Pulitzer Prize winner that stands as one of the finest American regional novels of the past thirty years. Miles Roby manages the Empire Grill in Empire Falls, Maine, a dying mill town whose every significant piece of real estate is owned by the widow Francine Whiting. Miles has been waiting his entire adult life for things to resolve themselves: for his failing marriage to end, for his difficult teenager Tick to find her footing, for Mrs. Whiting to make good on the implicit promise that decades of deferred gratification will eventually be rewarded. Russo is the great novelist of the American working-class town in slow decline, and this is his most fully achieved portrait of that world.
What is Empire Falls about?
Empire Falls follows Miles Roby across the months in which the accommodations he has made with his life begin to give way simultaneously. His marriage to Janine is effectively over; Janine is dating a man Miles finds ridiculous. His daughter Tick, a talented artist, is struggling with the specific cruelty of small-town high school and a situation that Miles can sense but cannot quite see. His employer and the town's dominant power, Mrs. Whiting, has been dangling the possibility of leaving Miles the Empire Grill for years while doing exactly nothing to make good on it. The novel is about the specific psychology of a man who has confused patience with paralysis, and about the specific social ecology of a post-industrial American town where the mills have closed, the young people have left, and the ones who remain have worked out accommodations with decline.
Is Empire Falls a standalone or part of a series?
Empire Falls is a standalone novel. Russo has written several other novels set in small-town New England — Nobody's Fool (1993), which was adapted for film with Paul Newman, and its sequel Everybody's Fool (2016) — that share the regional setting and the working-class milieu but involve different characters and are not connected to Empire Falls's plot. Readers who love Empire Falls will likely want to read Nobody's Fool; it can be read before or after without any narrative dependency. The Straight Man (1997), set in a small Pennsylvania college, is another entry point for readers who find Russo's voice immediately compelling.
What should I read after Empire Falls?
After Empire Falls, Richard Russo's Nobody's Fool is the natural companion — equally comic, equally affectionate about working-class New England, and featuring one of Russo's great characters in Sully Sullivan. For other American regional novels with comparable precision and affection for place, Richard Ford's Independence Day covers New Jersey suburban decline in the same period. Marilynne Robinson's Gilead covers small-town Iowa with a very different emotional register but comparable attention to what a specific place does to the people who live there. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout covers coastal Maine with the same combination of humour and desolation.
