The dying factory town is controlled by a domineering widow who seems to relish its demise. Russo's eye and ear for small-town life are evident on every page.'Įmpire Falls, Maine, is a shell of its former self of this there can be no argument. calls Tick 'surely one of the most appealing adolescents ever to grace the pages of fiction.' The Baltimore City Paper likes Max, whose 'confidence is almost touching, a warped expression of unconditional parental love.' The Detroit Free Press can't decide: 'Even relatively minor - Tick's vastly untalented art teacher - are fully formed. Sample any two reviews of the book and you'll discover that few readers agree who is best. Notably, the new novel presents his largest cast of characters yet. 'These books seem to be getting bigger both in the number of pages and the number of things I'm tackling,' the author admitted during his visit to Powell's.

The result is a compassionate and hilarious story, the most ambitious novel of his career. In fact, Empire Falls infuses the blue-collar landscape of Russo's earlier work with the high comedy of Straight Man. His fifth novel, Empire Falls, turns its own pages.īooklist noted, 'Russo follows up his rollicking academic satire, Straight Man (1997), with a return to the blue-collar milieu featured in his first three novels and once again shows an unerring sense of the rhythms of small-town life, balancing his irreverent, mocking humor with unending empathy for his characters and their foibles.' Careful: Laboratory tests confirm that Richard Russo's prose promotes addictive behavior among committed readers of fiction.

The straight man novel