Writing Empire Falls
Richard Russo

One of the earliest images I was visited by for Empire Falls is also one of the first I put in the book: a very thin high school girl walking along a street, weighed down by a backpack full of school books, leaning forward, as if into a strong headwind. Both my daughters were still in high school when I began the novel, and Kate, the younger, had already been diagnosed with the beginnings of scoliosis (curvature of the spine) as a result of walking home from school every day under a pack that weighed as much as she did. The more I thought about it, this seemed an apt metaphor for the enormous and often unnecessary weight we put on kids today, burdens that sometimes, no surprise, leave them twisted or, more tragically, cause them to snap.

I also had, right from the start, a minor character named Walt Comeau, "The Silver Fox," who shows up in Chapter One, singing (a la Perry Como) "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes." Walt is an aging stud who still imagines himself to be indispensable to women, and he runs, appropriately I think, the town's one health club. Like Billy Crystal's Fernando (of Saturday Night Live), Walt believes it's better to look good than to feel good, and these days he's got a lot of company. Narcissistic in the extreme, he cares only about surfaces and believes that killer abs are necessary to one's emotional well-being.

What I didn't understand at the time, or even much later, was how these early images and characters would work together to dramatize what turned out to be one of the novel's central themes. Both Tick Roby, the girl under the backpack, and Walt Comeau, are products of our dubious culture, which steals the innocence of children by forcing them to grow up before they're ready or able, even as it infantalizes adults by encouraging them to chase after eternal youth. Either of these cultural influences would be bad enough; together they are catastrophic. The only way to be either a real kid or a real adult in America today is to exist outside the culture, which seems determined that you'll be neither.

The good news is that Empire Falls, Maine, does exist, at least in part, outside the culture. Not completely, as the book's events suggest, but at least far enough outside it to be interesting and worth caring about.

 

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Richard Russo's fifth novel, Empire Falls, is a Book Sense 76 Pick (see below) and is on the Book Sense bestseller list. His previous novels are Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobody’s Fool and Straight Man. He lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters.

A May/June 2001 Book Sense 76 Pick
"Russo draws us into the life of a man for whom everything seem settled but now is suddenly quite unsettled. As events unfold, Russo's depiction of this small town and those who are shaped by it is so lifelike you will find yourself revisiting them long after you finish the book. Ribald, melancholy, and nearly perfect; Russo is a master of the intricacies of everyday lives."

Jean Westcott, Olsson's Books & Records, Arlington, VA