Richard Russo. Empire Falls. 2001; Knopf, 2010.

I picked up Empire Falls because I read somewhere that it had a connection with The Great Gatsby. Well, it does contain the famous quotation about “boats against the current,” from that novel—other than that, no so much.

Having said that, Russo does suggest as Fitzgerald did elsewhere that “the very rich… are different from you and me.” Perhaps they were. If anything, Russo suggests that they are less different now than they used to be.

We see most of the story through the eyes of Miles Roby. Miles is a native of Empire Falls, Maine. Like most industrial towns in New England, it had peaked about a hundred years before. The Empire Textile mills prospered for a long time, and then gradually lost business and eventually closed. The Whiting family, the owners of the business, are still well off and control much of the town’s real estate, including the Empire Grill. Miles has worked in the grill since he dropped out of college to support his family and now manages it.

Now in his forties, Miles’ wife is leaving him for a sexier man who calls himself the Silver Fox. Miles’ teenage daughter Tick struggles to negotiate both the administration and social pecking order at the Empire Falls High School. Sociologists have said that a woman who is living with a man not her husband and who has a daughter has put her daughter in danger. While we never are privy to any details, Tick (given name Christina) most assiduously avoids Walt Comeau, the Silver Fox.

Fitzgerald in his novels implies that the rich are able to get away with things that “you and I” cannot. In Empire Falls, set in the nineties, the amorality has flowed down the social ladder, and it has consequences. We see plenty of irony—some sad, some funny, some simply saying “I told you so.” No one seems to really succeed in this town. It is all anyone can do to stay afloat. (Also because it is set in the nineties, baseball fans here look at the Red Sox as a fatalistically as they view anything else in life.)

To Miles, there is a place of escape and freedom—Martha’s Vineyard. He has successful college friends whom he visits there every year, but the Massachusetts resort island would be too expensive to move to. As the story progresses, we understand that the Vineyard is a refuge but maybe an Eden with its own species of serpent.

Nearly everyone in Empire Falls seems to be unlucky in marriage. Miles’ wife divorces him, but it turns out that Walt Comeau has a lot to hide. Miles, in turn, has carried a crush on Charlene, a waitress at the grill who has been married and divorced four times herself. And, in turn, Cindy Whiting, daughter and heiress to whatever us left of the Whiting fortune, has carried a torch for Miles most of her life. She and Miles were born on the same day—she sees them as kind of soul mates—though now she shaves a few years off her age when she talks to people. Cindy is a paraplegic, having been run over by a car when she was a child.

There is a lot of low-key, real-life drama in the story. It builds. The characters come alive. Having lived in New England most of my adult life, I can vouch at least for the economic struggles in many small towns and cities with abandoned mills. By the time the tale ends, we have become invested in the town ourselves.

Because it is a small town that people move out of but not into, everyone knows everyone else. Even matriarch Mrs. Whiting knows about Miles’s crush on Charlene as well as the details of his parents’ relationship. His father is an alcoholic and a ne’er-do-well who survives by mooching, Social Security, and doing house painting of marginal quality. Miles’ father believes the Robys are a branch of the Robideauxs, a wealthy family from upriver. Mrs. Whiting was a Robideaux. It was not uncommon for French Canadian families in New England to anglicize their names, but to Miles, his father’s assertion is mere wishful thinking and a personal rationalization saying, “I am as good as they are.”

Mrs. Whiting is the eminence grise of the story. As owner of the grill, she keeps Miles under her thumb. When he was a boy Miles’ late mother lost her job at the mill when it closed. She began working as a kind of aide to Mrs. Whiting and Cindy. Mr. Whiting had moved to Mexico where he lived for years with a second wife and family, returning to Empire Falls only to die by suicide shortly after arriving.

The one person of character is Miles’ mother, Grace Roby. Others are often flawed and not really that likeable. The crooked cop Jimmy Minty and Miles have been at odds most of their lives. His son Zach Minty is the on-again off-again boyfriend of Tick. Tick does pretty much see things as they are but sees little hope out of her situation. She becomes friendly with Candace who lives in the poorest part of town. The high school principal, an old friend of her father’s, compels her to attend during a free period to John Voss, a strange, solitary kid who rarely talks.

All these characters, plus a few more like the two priests at the local Catholic Church, come together in Miles’ life to a rising climax. The final image might recall “boats against the current,” but it is really a lot closer to the final frames of Dr. Strangelove.

Mr. Whiting had tried to change the flow of the river that goes through the town so that debris from upriver does not wash onto his property. In doing so, he has business dealings with the Robideaux family, and that is how he met his wife. The river becomes a symbol. There are things in life, like the course of rivers, that people only have so much control over. The rest is left to “time and chance,” which happen to us all (see Ecclesiastes 9:11).

Though never fast-paced until the end, there are many surprises that keep us reading. So much so, the reader might hope for a sequel. There is a note of hope for both Miles and Tick at the end, but can either of them rise above their circumstances?