Empire Falls

Richard Russo may be best known as the author of ”Nobody’s Fool,” the small town novel that became the basis of the sweet souled 1994 Paul Newman movie. Like ”Fool,” two of Russo’s other previous works (”Mohawk” and ”The Risk Pool”) were set in upstate New York, while his last book, the academic satire ”Straight Man,” took place in western Pennsylvania. With Empire Falls, the writer heads north to Maine, where the weather — and the characters — are colder.

Russo paints a vividly stark portrait of life in a contemporary ghost town. Empire Avenue was once a bustling thoroughfare, but ”now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.” Much of the action takes place around the Empire Grill, a run-down diner that’s a kind of anti Cheers: It’s a place where everybody knows your name, but you wish they didn’t.

Proprietor Miles Roby (or ”the Human Rut,” as his bitter ex-wife Janine dubs him) is a 42-year-old sad sack who dropped out of college intending to run the joint for only a few years. As the local factories shut down around him, Miles has waited for town oligarch Francine Whiting to deliver on her promise to transfer ownership of the restaurant to him. All the while, he’s had to deal with annoying customers like Walt Comeau, a 60-year-old health club owner who drives a van with his nickname, ”The Silver Fox,” emblazoned on the hood — and who, incidentally, stole Janine away from Miles.

”Empire Falls” is dense in the best sense of the word. Chapters set in the present are interspersed with italicized flashbacks tracing the tragically intertwined histories of the Whiting and Roby families. Each paragraph is packed with concise, precise phrases, and hardly a word is wasted in 483 pages. Even within a single era, the story line spans generations, as Russo shows a keen understanding of teen life through the character of Tick Roby, Miles’ high school sophomore daughter. She develops scoliosis from carrying too many books (”kids today stuffed the entire contents of their lockers into their seam stretched backpacks”), a metaphor Russo uses to illustrate the emotional baggage of her parents’ divorce.

”Ambition? it’ll kill you every time,” one townie warns his son. Yet with this deeply ambitious book, Richard Russo has found new life as a writer.