The Social Contract

...He does not condescend to his characters or the places they call home, but rather makes both as vivid and interesting as any account of the glamorous denizens and precincts of Manhattan or Hollywood...

...But John Voss's dream, it turns out, is a very dark one, and will prove to have profound and unsettling consequences for the town...

...His wife of twenty years has kicked him out in favor of her lover, the owner of the local health club...

...I never dream...

...They tend toward irresponsibility, while the women in their lives tend to understandable dissatisfaction, and the children they produce seem fated to more of the same— no matter how much their parents might wish it otherwise...

...In unity of character, setting, and narrative, Empire Falls is without equal in recent American fiction...

...Grace had come to vibrant life in the company of a man they encountered there named Charlie Mayne, who was kind to Miles and devoted to his mother...

...And his best novels, the new Empire Falls and the 1993 Nobody's Fool, have uncommon heft...

...He has far too much of his self-sacrificing mother in him and not nearly enough of his reprobate father Max: "It probably was admirable that his father never battled his own nature, never expected more of himself than experience had taught him was wise, thereby avoiding disappointment and self-recrimination...

...Max Roby dreams of spending the winter in Key West where nobody minds if you don't bathe and do cadge drinks...

...The naggingly unfinished questions raised on Cape Cod about the nature of his mother's heart are in part the cause of his paralytic existence in Empire Falls...

...The only notable difference between the town of Empire Falls and the town of Mohawk (the setting of his first two novels, Mohawk and The Risk Pool) is that Empire Falls is in Maine, while Mohawk is in New York...

...Miles is not a discontented man: "There was much to be thankful for, even if the balance of things remained too precarious to inspire confidence, so on nights like this one his life seemed almost . . . almost enough...

...Max Roby isn't some noble Tolstoyan hardworking peasant: "By the time they'd discovered his shoddy work in Boothbay, he'd be painting someone else's windows shut in Bar Harbor...

...Miles may be too accepting of his fate, but Francine Whiting's hubristic determination to control Miles's life as well as the day-to-day doings of Empire Falls and even the direction of the powerful river that runs through it proves far more unwise...

...Despite a crippling fear of heights and a too-busy life, he has agreed to paint for free the local Catholic Church where he is a loyal parishioner...

...hand to mouth, paid under the table in cash, they dream of new economic development that will offer new economic hope, but are invariably disappointed...

...Whiting—and even more mysterious that Mrs...

...Miles fears that his own beloved sixteen-year-old daughter Tick might be heeding his own passive example...

...Mrs...

...Midway through the novel, Miles learns that Charlie Mayne's real name was C.B...

...and] outside the town's one shabby little rumored-to-be gay bar whose entrance was being renovated: ENTER IN REAR...

...Clever like her father, Tick loves to root out what the two of them call "Empire Moments": "lapses in logic on printed signs like the one on the brick wall that surrounded the old empty shirt factory: NO TRESPASSING WITHOUT PERMISSION...

...Of course, John does dream, just like everybody else in Empire Falls...

...And yet, when the health-club owner persists in bringing his business to Miles's restaurant, Miles serves him with little complaint...

...Nothing could be further from the truth, for Richard Russo is one of the funniest, wisest, and most exhilarating novelists writing in America today...

...Miles dreams of Cape Cod and the Empire Grill waitress with whom he has been fruitlessly in love since he was fifteen...

...They are packed with incident and plot, and by the time you are done, you feel as though you have gotten to know scores of people and that you could navigate your way around town in a rental car without getting lost...

...Whiting—the fourth-generation owner of the town mill where Grace was employed...

...Told to paint something they dream about, Tick paints a snake and John an egg...

...John's painting is derived instead from an offhand remark spoken by the mother who abandoned him: "If chickens had any idea what was in store for them, they'd stay where they were in their eggs...

...Why would the boy dream about eggs, Tick wonders...

...As a boy, Miles had spent a week on the Cape with his mother Grace during one of his housepainter father's frequent disappearing acts...

...This makes it all the more mysterious that, after Charlie's suicide a few years after the Cape Cod vacation, Grace would have gone to work as the private secretary to Mrs...

...But then Tick begins to show strains of her father's excessive sense of duty to others after she shares an art class with a deeply strange boy named John Voss...

...Russo slowly unravels the causes for their failures of purpose in feats of brilliant storytelling that make these two novels as unexpectedly gripping as any thriller...

...Still, in each book, Russo is primarily telling the story of one exceptional man—a sixty-year-old day laborer in Nobody's Fool, a forty-two-year-old grill manager in Empi-re Falls—who has made too little of his life...

...I don't dream about eggs," he tells her...

...His fifth novel, Empi^re Falls, is about a small town in the Northeastern United States that has seen better days...

...In a Russo novel, the men gather every morning and afternoon at the local lunch counter and drink and smoke their nights away at the same bar they've been patronizing for forty years...

...It was a fine, sensible way to live, really, much more sensible than Miles's manner as he went about his business, disappointed by his failure to scramble up ladders, blaming himself for his wife's infidelity, perversely maneuvering himself into situations that guaranteed aggravation, if not outright distress...

...He shoulders responsibility—any responsibility, no matter how small—with cheerful resignation...

...Just as the settings are similar, so are the characters populating them...

...You sink into them the way you sink into a juicy Victorian novel about provincial life...

...In brief, then, Russo sounds like a writer filled with proletarian gloom about the hellish lives of Americans who missed out on decades of national pros-perity—a voice of the voiceless and therefore worthy and depressing as hell, whose novels sit accusingly on the shelves in bookstores trying to shame readers into buying them...

...For reasons inexplicable to him, she delights in his company even as she delights in tormenting him— reminding him what a disappointment he would be to his late mother because he dropped out of college to return to Empire Falls after her death and has never left...

...Empire Falls unfolds its thrilling design from the outset, the meaning of the first page fully clear only when one has finished the last...

...And Miles continues to manage the Empire Grill in the employ of the town's premier citizen and owner, Mrs...

...Everybody advises Miles to relocate to Cape Cod, where he goes on vacation for a week every summer, because it's the only place on earth he feels happy...

...Francine Whiting, despite her long-ago promise to give him title to the place...

...What's more, Charlie was husband to Francine...

...And in the end, benevolent and loving creator that he is, Russo offers them a certain measure of redemption...

...Tick begins to take John under her wing, protecting him from her bully boyfriend and securing him a job at the Empire Grill...

...Miles's ex-wife Janine dreams of living a life of privilege with her new beau, who is not what he seems...

...And both Empire Falls and Mohawk bear a distinct resemblance to North Bath, another fictional town in New York, in which Russo set his third novel, Nobody's Fool...

...Whiting would have taken such a complex interest in him...

...Whiting is the Miss Havisham of his life...

...Miles Roby, the protagonist of Empire Falls, is the most charmingly dutiful man on earth...

...That one week has haunted Miles's life ever since...

...Even Russo's sole foray into upper-middle-class portraiture, an academic comedy called Straight Man, is set in a third-rate state university in a dying Pennsylvania coal town where budget cuts are looming...

...Living from A columnist for the New York Post, John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...