Building Empire

Richard Russo on small towns and his new book

By John Freeman

RICHARD RUSSO: continuing to mine the comedic gems offered by hardworking folk.

Driving up Route 1 toward Camden on a crisp April morning, it’s hard to imagine that this sun-dappled coastline bears any resemblance to Mohawk or North Bath, the two gritty upstate New York hamlets Richard Russo brought to life in his previous novels. Glimpses of the craggy shore reveal slight traces of snow, while historic villages announce their tourist attractions in curlicue letters. And yet, for ten years, Russo has made his home in Maine, first as a teacher at Colby College, and currently as a full-time writer. “When I moved here I felt right at home,” the 52-year-old novelist recalls in the living room of his immaculate century-old colonial. “When it’s cold, you have winter with a capital W.” Now, with the arrival of spring, Russo delivers his boldest work of fiction yet, Empire Falls, an epic new novel set here in the Vacationland. “I seldom write about any place I’m living,” the short, barrel-chested writer claims with a flourish of his hand. “Wherever I am, I am always looking imaginatively somewhere else. I had to be here ten years until I scratched the surface of what this place means.”

With the affectionate humor and digressive gusto that have become his trademarks, Empire Falls paints a lavish mural of Russo’s adopted landscape. Set in fictional Dexter County, an area that’s fallen upon hard times, the novel explores the aftermath of the demise of the state’s textile and logging industries. The town of Empire Falls remains under control of the ruling clan, the Whitings, presided over by the widow, Francine. As manager of the Empire Grill, Miles Roby, the book’s protagonist, must confront an uncertain future. Mrs. Whiting has promised Roby ownership of his fledging business after her death, but for the meantime, she lords over him with a barely concealed condescension. Miles’ wife divorces him for a slick health-club owner, and his daughter, Tick, flirts dangerously with an eating disorder.

Brimming with vintage Russo moments — from the lazy banter of regulars at the grill to the exploits of Mrs. Whiting’s ill-tempered female cat, Timmy — the novel effortlessly straddles comedy and drama. Russo tells, in tandem, the back-story of the eccentric Whiting family, which includes C.B. Whiting, the dilettante son who reluctantly returned from a decade in Mexico to build his own “hacienda” on the banks of the Knox River. With a robber baron’s arrogance, he reroutes the river to bolster the economy of Empire Falls. In assured, unhurried prose, Russo reveals how Miles’ life is intertwined with the Whitings’ in ways that run deeper than commerce.

As Russo notes, a local news story provided the inspiration for Empire Falls. “When we were living in Waterville there was a Hathaway shirt factory that the employees tried to buy, but it was owned by a multinational corporation. It was a big event locally when it shut down and all these women lost their jobs. And they had been working at that shirt factory all of their lives. It seemed to me to be something that was happening all over the United States — people losing jobs they had had all of their lives. How do you come to terms with what has just happened to you?”

While his success as a screenwriter (first for his own book, Nobody’s Fool, and then later for Twilight, and most recently, Flamingo Rising) has brought Russo a certain affluence, he remains committed to depicting the struggles of hardscrabble people. “I come from a working-class background, and the town I grew up in, Gloversville, New York, had a lot of leather factories and tanneries that had either slowed down or shut down. And I remember watching my father and grandfather living in this one-industry town, and watching that one industry collapse.”

Although his father held a variety of jobs about town, from tending bar to cutting leather, Russo felt destined to leave. “I worked on a road crew one summer, but it was clear that I was one of the college boys, and that when summer ended I’d be off.” He attended the University of Arizona, where he eventually earned a doctorate in American literature. It wasn’t until he was finishing his thesis that he considered writing fiction. Russo’s first book, Mohawk, was published in 1986 when he was 37 (and will be rereleased in hardcover on the same date as Empire Falls). He continued to teach as he wrote, satirizing the world of academe with his last novel, Straight Man, a hilarious send-up of the foibles of university life.

By contrast, Empire Falls is a graver, darker book. “It’s not just the Whitings’ empire which is falling; a whole way of life has vanished. We are a nation that doesn’t make anything anymore. My father and I once worked on one of the Albany Thruway exits, and we could drive by, and say ‘there’s a lot of our sweat in that.’ It’s not an experience that people know. It’s about these ephemeral words on a computer screen, and if you press the wrong button, poof! they’re gone.”

I have a palpable sense that Russo has labored strenuously on this novel much in the same way he once paved roads. Russo writes each morning on legal pads while sipping coffee at a Camden cafe, and then revises in the afternoon on the computer. The daily effort has paid off, as Empire Falls evokes the sweep of two centuries, an ambition Russo attributes in part to his screen writing. “For the longest time, if I’ve been writing screenplays, I’ve been using just a hammer and a screw driver. And when I go back to being a novelist, I can open up the whole toolbox.”

John Freeman can be reached at freeman109@hotmail.com.