Literature / Empire Falls

Empire Falls is a 2001 novel by Richard Russo.

It is set in the small town of Empire Falls, Maine. Once Empire Falls was a Company Town that was more or less completely owned by the Whiting family, who also owned the mill and the shirt factory. But C.B. Whiting killed himself, and his widow Francine sold off the mill and the shirt factory and turned most of the town out of work. Now Empire Falls is a Dying Town with a shrinking population.

The protagonist is 42-year-old Miles Roby, who runs the Empire Grill, the town's Greasy Spoon and one of the few remaining businesses, although the grill is in the red. Miles has various ideas to make the restaurant profitable again, but runs into opposition from Mrs. Whiting, who seems to hate change of any sort.

Miles is basically a doormat who lets people walk all over him. He had ambitions to get a college degree and do something in the literary world, but years ago when his mom was dying of cancer he came back and started to work at the Grill. At least part of the reason was that young Miles was desperately in love with the Empire Grill's curvaceous waitress Charlene, but she friend-zoned him, and 20 years have rolled by with Miles stuck at the grill. After he missed his shot with Charlene, Miles married a local girl named Janice, and they have a teenaged daughter, "Tick" (Christina). However, Janine cheated on Miles with local gym owner Walt Comeau, and as the story opens, their divorce is about to be finalized.

The town is full of colorful characters. Miles's father Max is a shiftless deadbeat and perpetual drunk who as it happens is pretty happy living life that way. Local cop Jimmy Minty is an old "friend" of Miles who actually doesn't like Miles at all. Jimmy's son Zack is a loathsome bully who to Miles's horror is dating Tick. And there's the Posthumous Character of Miles's mother, Grace, dead for two decades. Much of the plot revolves around an affair Grace had when Miles was nine, when she went to Martha's Vineyard with Miles in tow and met a mysterious man named Charlie.

In 2005 this novel was adapted into a two-part TV movie directed by Fred Schepisi that featured Paul Newman in his last on-screen role (Newman's actual last role was as the voice of Doc Hudson in Cars.)

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Tropes:

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Charlene claims that she would like to get with a good man like Miles, but that she has "an abiding preference for bad men whose insides were all twisted up in knots." She then admits that basically, she isn't attracted to him because he's dull.
  Charlene: I just don't think I could go through life at your speed, Miles. Don't you ever just want to put the pedal down to the floor and just see what it feels like?
• All Love Is Unrequited: A running theme. Rich girl Cindy Whiting has loved protagonist Miles Roby, proprietor of the local Greasy Spoon, since they were teens. Miles is aware of this but simply doesn't love her back, instead being infatuated with Charlene, the curvaceous waitress at his restaurant. Unfortunately Charlene put Miles in the friend zone some 25 years ago—which is why he married Janice, despite the fact that he doesn't love her. She eventually divorces him when she realizes this. Even among the teenagers, Tick's friend Candace is desperately in love with Zack, who holds her in contempt.
• Awful Wedded Life: Everyone. The opening has C.B. Whiting thinking about how both his father and grandfather wanted to kill their wives, and the finale reveals that Whiting nearly murdered Francine. Miles and Janice's marriage fell apart. Charlene was married and divorced four times. Jimmy Minty used to beat his wife, until she left him.
• Axes at School: John Voss, who is revealed to have dumped his grandmother's body in a landfill, comes back to school with a gun. He kills three and leaves Tick's friend Candace a paraplegic, but Tick survives, thanks to Principal Meyer Taking the Bullet.
• Bookends: The novel starts with a Distant Prologue in which C.B. Whiting meets and marries Francine, only for her to drive him to suicide. It ends with a flashback that reveals C.B. had come home with every intention of murdering his wife, until the sight of her in the company of Grace and Cindy drove him to shoot himself, out of guilt over maiming his daughter.
• Brick Joke: Max Roby ambles over to the graveyard and urinates on C.B. Whiting's grave. Much later, Miles and Cindy visit the grave, and Miles notes the strong smell of urine while Cindy wonders why the flowers have wilted so soon.
• The Bully: Jimmy Minty's son Zack is an awful bullying creep, who delights in cruelty and makes particular sport out of tormenting weirdo loner John Voss. On the football field, he delivers a late hit to the other team's quarterback that knocks the quarterback out for the rest of the season.
• Buxom Beauty Standard: Charlene has a sizable bust. Miles was just one of the boys who were hypnotized by her voluptuousness. Jimmy Minty told of getting a glimpse of her cleavage dangling when she bent over in a bikini. Charlene herself attributes generous tips to her breasts, and Mrs. Whiting calls her "the one with the knockers."
• Call-Back:
  • The kids in art class are given an assignment to paint what they dream. John Voss draws an egg, and when Tick asks why an egg, creepy John forcefully denies dreaming anything. At the climax of the novel, when the boy shows up at school with a gun and starts shooting, he points the gun at Tick and says "This is what I dream."
  • Timmy the cat was rescued from the river when she was found clinging to a bit of burlap. At the end of the story Timmy is riding the dead body of Mrs. Whiting, drowned in the flood.
• Calling Parents by Their Name: Janine's hostile relationship with her mother Bea is demonstrated by Janine calling her mother "Beatrice".
• Cats Are Mean: A Running Gag concerning Mrs. Whiting's cat Timmy, a girl despite the name, who is as mean as her owner. Miles longs to drown Timmy, who always scratches him when he visits Mrs. Whiting. In one scene he leaves the window to his car open, and finds that Timmy got in and scratched the upholstery on the passenger seat all to hell.
• Chekhov's Gun: Jimmy Minty's POV reveals that he has a key machine that he bought from a going-out-of-business hardware store, and Jimmy says he has a skeleton key that can open any door in town. It turns out that Jimmy's been committing a series of thefts and decorating his home with the proceeds.
• Distant Finale: The finale skips forward several years to reveal that Miles and Tick have been on Martha's Vineyard the whole time, as she recuperates from the school shooting. Miles, no longer under Mrs. Whiting's thumb, elects to go back and work with Bea at her restaurant.
• Dogged Nice Guy: Miles spends 25 years hanging around Charlene kind of hoping that she'll give him a shot, even as she cycles through four husbands. He finally gives up after realizing that she is in a relationship with his brother David.
• Driven to Suicide: Many years ago C.B. Whiting killed himself. It's implied that his horrible bitch of a wife drove him to suicide, but the ending flashback reveals that it was actually his guilt over running over his own daughter with a car, leaving her a cripple.
• Drunk Driver:
  • Miles' brother David was an alcoholic whose drinking resulted in an accident that cost him the use of one of his hands; David then quit the bottle.
  • Miles's father Max the drunken lout lost both his license and his car after DUIs. Max does not care.
• Dying Town: Empire Falls, ever since all the manufacturing jobs went away. The restaurant is withering for lack of customers, and the loss in population has caused the football team to be dropped to a smaller class.
• Flashback: The book opens and closes with flashbacks from the POV of Charlie Whiting. Another flashback has 9-year-old Miles going with his mom for a trip to Martha's Vineyard, which is really a rendezvous with her lover.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: Walt Comeau, who keeps coming in the Empire Grill and calling Miles "Big Boy" and challenging him to arm wrestling, all the while giving unwanted advice and marveling loudly over how Miles could have let Janice go. At one point when Walt is being particularly obnoxious, Horace tells Miles that "No jury would convict you."
• Greasy Spoon: The Empire Grill, a greasy spoon place that used to offer simple fare and cater to mill workers when they weren't on shift. Over the past 20 years or so, however, the mills have closed and Empire Falls has become a Dying Town, and the restaurant has long since run in the red. Miles, casting about for a way to make money, is trying to lift the Grill out of greasy spoon status, expanding the fare from hamburgers and pasta to stuff like Mexican food and other specialized cuisine; the idea is to replace the long-gone mill workers with professors from nearby college towns.
  Despite his youth, Miles did understand that people didn't go to places like the Empire Grill for the food.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Throughout the book Janine is depicted as selfish, vain, and self-centered. She constantly insults Miles who is the sympathetic POV character, and she cheated on her good-hearted husband with the obnoxious Walt whom everyone in the town hates. In fact nobody likes her, not even Tick. But when her POV chapter reveals that Miles never once gave her an orgasm in twenty years of marriage, and in fact theirs was an almost Sexless Marriage, her motives for cheating and divorce are more understandable.
• One-Sided Arm-Wrestling: Walt is forever trying to challenge Miles to an arm-wrestling contest. As he's about to challenge Mrs. Whiting, Miles decides to take him up on it finally, and ends up slamming Walt's arm against the bar so hard Walt falls on the floor. Miles then storms out.
  Charlene: Damn! Now that was worth waiting for!
• Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: Principal Meyer is "mopping his glistening forehead" as he awkwardly broaches to Tick the idea of John Voss, the bully victim, joining her private lunches.
• The Place: "Empire Falls", with a name that fits its Dying Town status.
• Posthumous Character: Miles's mother Grace, dead some 20 years, and C.B. Whiting who has been dead for nearly as long. The book opens and ends with flashbacks showing C.B., and there are flashbacks to Miles and Grace going to Martha's Vineyard and meeting a man who turns out to be C.B. Whiting.
• Present Tense Narrative: All of the chapters from the various POV characters are told in standard past tense—except for some reason the chapters from Tick's POV. Possibly as a means of underlining the emotional urgency of high schoolers, Tick's chapters are told in present tense.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The normally mild-mannered, somewhat wimpy Miles gets angry when Jimmy makes a comment about how Grace Roby wouldn't have been happy to see her son coming back to Empire Falls.
  "No. Shut up and listen, Jimmy. You...didn't...know...her. Say it for me, so I know you understand."
  Jimmy Minty's face had gone pale. "Hey, okay. I didn't really know your mother."
• Reassigned to Antarctica: Father Mark got reassigned to Empire Falls, a Dying Town with a church that will probably soon be amalgamated, because he got arrested at an anti-war protest.
• The Reveal:
  • It may not be hard to guess that "Charlie Mayne", the lover that Grace Roby met at Martha's Vineyard, was C.B. Whiting, but Miles is still surprised when he figures it out.
  • The end of the book reveals that it was actually C.B. Whiting himself who ran over his daughter Cindy, leaving her permanently crippled; this is what drove him to kill himself.
• Russian Roulette: Zack Minty the bullying cretin does this, but he takes all the bullets out of the gun first. He's just trying to impress his friends.
• Secret Other Family: Eventually it's revealed that C.B. Whiting had a second family in Mexico. At one point a Mexican woman shows up and revealed herself, and Mrs. Whiting bought her off.
• Silver Fox: Walt Comeau, one of the antagonists, tries to invoke this—he actually calls himself the Silver Fox. He's also a Smug Snake and hiding numerous secrets, including his age (10 years older than he claims) and ramshackle personal finances.
• Switching P.O.V.: Miles gets the most POV time but there are many other characters with POV moments: Janine, Tick, Father Mark, Max, and Jimmy Minty, and more.
• Taking the Bullet: Principal Meyer steps in front of Tick, takes a bullet for her (John Voss is shooting up the school) and is killed.
• Tragic Dropout: Miles dropped out of college his senior year, to look after his dying mother, although he actually stuck around because he was infatuated with sexy waitress Charlene. His mother was horrified by his decision.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: John Voss, the creepy boy in Tick's art class that she forms a sort of friendship with. It's eventually revealed that he is the son of horribly abusive drug-addicted parents who, before they abandoned him, were given to sometimes tying him up in a burlap sack and leaving him there for hours. At the end of the book John shoots up his art class, killing three.