Reading: Middlemarch and The Geography of Nowhere

Listening: How Green Was My Valley.

House: it's clean! Reasonably clean.

Moving: none today, but I did Wednesday and Thursday and will tomorrow. Honest.

31 July 2002: Empire Falls

I went looking for reviews of Empire Falls because while large stretches of its prose and several of its characters pleased me, most of its plot and other characters about made me tear my hair out. Looking, in January Magazine I found this sentence:

"Miles Roby is the operator of the Empire Grill, one of the last businesses left in a town that's main sources of employment -- the myriad Whiting factories -- have been shut down."

Since when, pray heaven, has "that's" replaced "whose" as an indefinite possessive adjective? I hope I'm right that I've never encountered that before. That offense makes Russo's occasional flubs--which glare from his otherwise absorbing prose--seem not so bad. For instance, I will go to my grave defending "decimate." A table of eight is decimated by absence: only four students sit there. Yarg. And twice Russo writes "inference" when he means "implication."

Antecedents might be obvious from context but I like them to be correct syntactically too:

"Do me a favor, X?" Y asked when he eased the [make of car] out onto Empire Avenue.

Syntactically, the antecedent of "he" is Y. Contextually, it's clearly X, since Y is in handcuffs and therefore not driving the other's car. Still. Maybe I was just fed up.

Fed up with the italics. The Princess Bride and I Know This Much Is True have long segments typeset in different font faces. Annoying but not unreadable. Russo chose unreadable here. Also, the interspersed italicked chapters are sometimes a character's background and other times a Portentious Flashback. It felt schticky. Also I'm pretty sure I would have caught onto what I was so supposed to catch onto even without the italics being a graphic clue that this-bit-connects-to-that-bit. USA Today says Empire Falls is Russo's best novel yet. It's wrong. The Times liked the novel too.

Well. Empire Falls has parallels I wish it hadn't to Oprah novels. Here I'm making a stereotype about books most of which I haven't read. It's never like Toni Morrison, all of whose published novels I've read. It is like Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, which I adore (and was written before authors fucking tried to produce Oprah books) and I Know This Much Is True, which I don't. It is like, um, Songs in Ordinary Time, the meaning of whose title I was never able to pin to the book at hand. It wasn't like that hideous Jane Hamilton that consumed hours of my life I'll never get back, Map of the World? I think those are all the Oprahs I've read. The main Oprah similarity was Sekrits to Guess at, in narrative pacing that felt forced. What did Horace see? Why would Max, who cares for no one but his granddaughter, scruple not to drop, idly one day, this or that Revelation?

It was mostly Lambish. In I Know This Much Is True, people in the town of Three Rivers, Connecticut, ended up connected to each other in Dickensianly unlikely ways. It Takes a Village to fuck up a person, basically. Same thing in Empire Falls. Same thing in the made-up Connecticut village where Dolores of She's Come Undone spends her first decade. The darkest shade of SCU, or at least of Dolores's childhood, was the Old Woman Controlling Everything, although it was Miles's mother (not father) who had the relationship with her. Grace Roby reminded me of Marie Price, but maybe that was only the Catholicism. Oh, and because I was looking for Oprahness at this point, Janine's losing all that weight reminded me of Dolores's losing all her weight.

It has a few too many parallels to Nobody's Fool. You know how Boston Red Sox fans compare their team to the Yankees, when Yankees fans are probably mostly unaware the Sox fans exist, unless they live in Rhode Island? It's like the UConn/Yale football game. To Yale, yawn, it's a game. To UConn, it's The Game. Russo used this intermural rivalry in Nobody's Fool, so in Empire Falls it felt like repetition. This novel has its own Rub Squeers, in Walt who cannot tell when he's not wanted. In Nobody's Fool, a mother calls her daughter by an epithet that hardly seems loving; the same mother-daughter epithet repeats here. Even names are repeated: Horace makes only a cameo in Nobody's Fool while his namesake has a bit part in Empire; but the deus ex machina of Nobody's Fool is called Miles, and what is Empire's protagonist's name? And did a driver's education student run over Russo's dog or something? Driver Ed is a main influence in Fool and an incident illustrates Miles's character in Empire, as well. Characters in both are described as bantam roosters; characters in both leave school to care for their parents.

Maybe Empire Falls stands alone as a better novel than it does for anyone who's read Russo's other work.

The final, Oprah-esque insult was that after 450 pages of actions set in September, the final thirty pages start, "In early April it turned warm." Blah. Not only is that a classic okaygottagetitalloverwithnow ploy, there is no way that the characters could have absented themselves from town right after the over-the-top action of the preceding chapter. I see from Amazon that many readers voiced the same problem with Straight Man--a hastily wrapped up, untrue ending. It occurs to me that I don't even remember the ending of Straight Man--I think happily ever after, with all ends tied into bows unlikely tidy. In that book, that didn't bother me. The novel was funny in exactly a straight man kind of way, not in a wry and real way like Nobody's Fool. I compared Man to Moo and Lucky Jim, not Nobody's Fool. Good in a different way from Fool: lighter, it carried fewer expectations.

In Empire Falls, threads should have been wrapped up that weren't, or unraveled like twine, or couldn't possibly be tied into a knot because after 400 page of thread they became hawser. Like this review.