Empire Falls by Richard Russo
This was a gift from a friend who knew how much I enjoyed Straight Man (the first book I read by Richard Russo, which was intelligent and hilarious.)
This one, sadly, wasn’t great. It was good to read, with the occasional flash of insight and humour, but I kept having to fight off this nagging doubt. About what, I wasn’t sure. When I finished it last night, I figured it out.
[spoiler warning!]
The end was this very strange mix of unsatisfying, frustrating and unbelievable. Most of the characters didn’t really seem to get anywhere, character-arc-wise. There was a lot of violent physical action that seemed strangely out of keeping with the rest of the story. And one scene, straight out of the headlines, seemed completely gratuitous. (What is gratuitous violence doing in supposed literary fiction?) So each character was given their wrap-up in a way that reflected back on their entire character arc and made you realize that most of them didn’t really have one. They seemed carefully drawn, but in the end, you realize they were actually pretty stereotypical and one-note.
The wrap-ups that really pissed me off were for the two “broken” characters. The white trash kids that had been abused. One of them shoots the other at school for no reason at all and then tries to turn the gun on himself. Even though all the other bullets worked just fine, this one is apparently too old and doesn’t go off. So, he’s doomed to life in prison, death row, whatever…
This is not a new idea - that abused kids are loners and freaks - but lately, given school shootings and the fear-mongering media circus, the idea that loners are inherently dangerous has become more entrenched. Not only are they doomed, but they’re ticking time-bombs that might take the innocent down with them. Now, having been a weird loner kid myself, I deeply resent this. Not everybody takes out a Kmart. And this is the idea this book seems to be reaffirming. Why? Surely the author could be a little more inventive.
We are repeatedly told how smart the main character is, but there is scant evidence of that. He never does anything except plod through the plot. We are told he wanted to be an academic, but we never see him read a book, have interests or ideas. In fact, he seems a little on the dim side. In one small scene his daughter is shows signs of an eating disorder, but that never (in nearly 500 pages) comes up again. Nearly everyone else seems to be lacking in motivation. Why is the nasty old lady so nasty, why is his mother so sad and hopeless, why is he so lethargic? Fine if the author doesn’t want to spell it all out for us, but we get the distinct impression there is no reason. It just gives them color. Character has to go deeper than that, I think.
My final complaint is that the point of view seems really muddled. Now, I admit I’m no master of the craft of writing, but it seems that the author is mixing the omniscient narrator’s voice with the characters’. As far as I understand, it’s fine to climb inside the head of a character for a while, but when Russo does this in this book, he still speaks with the narrator’s large vocabulary and slow descriptive style but there is added profanity, slang or the repetition of an opinion held by that character. It’s confusing, to say the least.
So, there it is: too many stereotypes and character clichés, not enough character development, too much telling and not showing, muddled voice and very disappointing ending. Too bad.
Tags: fiction