Scooter Chronicles

Earlier this week I finished reading “Empire Falls” by Richard Russo, the 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning novel.

From the review by Publishers Weekly on Amazon.Com, the rundown:

Wealthy, controlling matriarch Francine Whiting lives in an incongruous Spanish-style mansion across the river from smalltown Empire Falls, dominated by a long-vacant textile mill and shirt factory, once the center of her husband’s family’s thriving manufacturing dominion. In his early 40s, passive good guy Miles Roby, the son of Francine’s husband’s long-dead mistress, seems helpless to escape his virtual enslavement as longtime proprietor of the Whiting-owned Empire Grill, the town’s most popular eatery, which Francine has promised to leave him when she dies. Miles’s wife, Janine, is divorcing him and has taken up with an aging health club entrepreneur. In her senior year in high school, their creative but lonely daughter, Tick, is preoccupied by her parents’ foibles and harassed by the bullying son of the town’s sleazy cop who, like everyone else, is a puppet of the domineering Francine. Struggling to make some sense of her life, Tick tries to befriend a boy with a history of parental abuse. To further complicate things, Miles’s brother, David, is suspected of dealing marijuana, and their rascally, alcoholic father is a constant annoyance. Miles and David’s secret plan to open a competing restaurant runs afoul of Francine just as tragedy erupts at the high school.

There was something about Russo and this book that I wasn’t sure I would like. It has shown up on lists and that around. I had even gone through and looked at the Pulitzer Prize list and looked up the books to see what they were about. This was a couple of years ago. But for some reason I came back to this one and when I read the description this time, something clicked. I took a chance and got a copy through BookMooch.

What I have come to find out is that I like these sprawling epic type stories that are about families and friends, and that it’s not some thriller or gigantic mystery that needs to be solved. It’s just about their lives and how they lived them. Maybe this isn’t an epic, but it’s a long story. There are sections that float back to the days that Francine meeting her husband, and Miles spending time on Martha’s Vineyard as a kid and his high school days. No matter where Russo tread with the story, it was all well thought out, nicely paced, and arranged well.

Richard Russo

One of the brightest stars in this book though are the people. They are so very real. They all have quirks. They all do things wrong. They all have soft sides. They all want something that they might not have. They all weaknesses. They are alive and real. This had to be the biggest aspect of the book that made it so good. The story would have failed utterly had it been with characters that were there just to propel the story. Every single one, whether a major player, or a small bit part, the reader got to really see what they were about, and they were real.

This book shows that Russo is a very competent writer. His prose was not overdone. In some respects it was rather hidden. Most of it was rather workman-like, much like what the town and it’s people were. But he did use some gracefulness when needed, and at the right moments. I got the impression that the story and the characters that inhabited it was much more important, and there he shined.

This is the kind of book that can stay with you for a while. I have had a hard time letting go of the characters while starting my next reading adventure. I don’t know what it’s competition was for the year, but I am not surprised it was an award.