Richard Russo - Empire Falls

Acclaim for Richard Russos
EMPIRE FALLS

Not one wrong note. Russo demonstrates a stunning ability for nailing the essentials of character and atmosphere.

Newsday

Immensely satisfying. [Russo is] an unpretentious master of fictional technique whose deeper wisdom expresses itself in the distinctive fallibility, decency, humor, and grace of the indisputably, irresistibly real people he puts on the page.

The Boston Globe

The kind of big, sprawling, leisurely novel, full of subplots and vividly drawn secondary characters, that people are always complaining is an endangered species. Yet in part thanks to Russos deft satiric touchmuch of the book is laugh-out-loud funnyit never feels too slow or old-fashioned.

Salon

Russos most assured novel yet. Empire Falls makes you wish youd stayed in that small town you grew up in.

San Francisco Chronicle

[Russo is] one of the best novelists around. As the pace quickens and the disparate threads of the narrative draw tighter, you find yourself torn between the desire to rush ahead and the impulse to slow down.

The New York Times Book Review

That Empire Falls resonates so deeply is a measure of its unexpected truths. Richly satisfying.

The Washington Post Book World

A rare novel, thoughtful and entertaining.

USA Today

Engaging. Russos unique talent is his way of yoking wry humor to serious sadness, and rollicking entertainment to social commentary.

The Plain Dealer

Richard Russo
EMPIRE FALLS

Richard Russo lives in coastal Maine with his wife and their two daughters. He has written five novels: Mohawk, The Risk Pool, Nobodys Fool, Straight Man , and Empire Falls , and a collection of stories, The Whores Child .

Also by Richard Russo Mohawk
The Risk Pool
Nobodys Fool
Straight Man
The Whores Child and Other Stories

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MAY 2002

Copyright 2001 by Richard Russo

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2001.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.: Excerpts from Dont Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes by Slim
Willet, copyright 1952, copyright renewed 1980 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. All rights reserved. International rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.
Famous Music Corporation and Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from Magic Moments, music by Burt Bacharach and lyrics by Hal David, copyright 1957, copyright renewed 1985 by Famous Music Corporation and Casa David. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Famous Music Corporation and Hal Leonard Corporation on behalf of Casa David. Music Sales Corporation and The Estate of Dick Manning: Excerpt from Hot Diggity, words and music by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning, copyright 1956 (copyright renewed) by Al Hoffman Songs, Inc. (ASCAP) and the Dick Manning Music Company. All rights for Al Hoffman Songs, Inc., administered by Music Sales Corporation (ASCAP). All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Music Sales Corporation and the Estate of Dick Manning.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Russo, Richard, 1949
Empire falls : a novel / Richard Russo.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80988-9
1. RestaurantsFiction. 2. RestaurateursFiction. 3. Working classFiction.
4. Fathers and daughtersFiction. 5. MaineFiction. I. Title.
PS3568.U812 E4 2001b
813.54dc21 2001088568

Author photograph J. D. Sloan

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For Robert Benton

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A S USUAL my debts are substantial. For space, I wish to thank Fitzpatricks Cafe, the Camden Deli, and Jorgensons. Thanks also to Perley Sasuclark, who told me a story I needed to hear, and to Allen Pullen at the Open Hearth, who reeducated me about restaurants. To Gary Fisketjon, who has labored over this manuscript so lovingly, Id attempt to describe my gratitude in words, but then hed have to edit them, and hes worked too hard already. To Nat Sobel and Judith Weber, who have been with me from the start, my love. To my wife, Barbara, who reads each book more times than anyone should have to read anything, more love. To my daughters, Emily and Kate, who have been the kind of girls, and now, young women, who have freed their father to worry about people who dont exist outside his imagination, more gratitude than I can express; this time, to Kate especially, for reminding me by means of concrete detail just how horrible high school can be, and how lucky we all are to escape more or less intact.

PROLOGUE

C OMPARED to the Whiting mansion in town, the house Charles Beaumont Whiting built a decade after his return to Maine was modest. By every other standard of Empire Falls, where most single-family homes cost well under seventy-five thousand dollars, his was palatial, with five bedrooms, five full baths, and a detached artists studio. C. B. Whiting had spent several formative years in old Mexico, and the house he built, appearances be damned, was a mission-style hacienda. He even had the bricks specially textured and painted tan to resemble adobe. A damn-fool house to build in central Maine, people said, though they didnt say it to him .

Like all Whiting males, C.B. was a short man who disliked drawing attention to the fact, so the low-slung Spanish architecture suited him to a T. The furniture was of the sort used in model homes and trailers to give the impression of spaciousness; this optical illusion worked well enough except on those occasions when large people came to visit, and then the effect was that of a lavish dollhouse .

The haciendaas C. B. Whiting always referred to itwas built on a tract of land the family had owned for several generations. The first Whitings of Dexter County had been in the logging business, and theyd gradually acquired most of the land on both sides of the Knox River so they could keep an eye on what floated by on its way to the ocean, some fifty miles to the southeast. By the time C. B. Whiting was born, Maine had been wired for electricity, and the river, dammed below Empire Falls at Fairhaven, had lost much of its primal significance. The forestry industry had moved farther north and west, and the Whiting family had branched out into textiles and paper and clothing manufacture .

Though the river was no longer required for power, part of C. B. Whitings birthright was a vestigial belief that it was his duty to keep his eye on it, so when the time came to build his house, he selected a site just above the falls and across the Iron Bridge from Empire Falls, then a thriving community of men and women employed in the various mills and factories of the Whiting empire. Once the land was cleared and his house built, C.B. would be able to see his shirt factory and his textile mill through the trees in winter, which, in mid-Maine, was most of the year. His paper mill was located a couple miles upstream, but its large smokestack billowed plumes of smoke, sometimes white and sometimes black, that he could see from his back patio .

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