Russo, writ large

Joanne Lannin, Staff Writer

Copyright © 2001 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

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"Empire Falls," by Rick Russo Excerpt from 'Empire Falls' "On Labor Day, without warning, Max returned. Miles, out enjoying the last day of summer vacation, came home at noon for lunch and found the Dodge parked outside and Max, shirtless and berry-brown from a summer's worth of painting people's windows shut, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the Empire Gazette as if hoping to find in it news of what Miles and his mother had been up to during his absence. When Miles walked in, his father finished the paragraph he was reading, then looked up and, seeing his son, grinned. Miles could see that he was missing a couple of teeth. "What happened?" he asked, immediately frightened. "What's this? Max said, sticking his tongue through the new gap. "It's nothing. I just had a difference of opinion with a guy, is all. He doesn't know it yet, but he's going to pay me about five hundred bucks per tooth." Miles nodded, not so much reassured by his father's explanation as by his presence. Having dreaded Max's return, he immediately felt how good it was to have him home. His father had only a couple of speeds, which made him predictable, and Miles was ready for things to be predictable again, even if they were predictably odd. Max might not be like other men, but he was always like himself. Other men, for instance, might get upset over minor car accidents, whereas Max saw fender benders as opportunities. If somebody backed into him in a parking lot, which people did with such regularity as to raise suspicions that Max purposely put himself in harm's way, Max took his damaged car to a mechanic he depended upon for an inflated estimate, then he'd offer to settle the matter for half the estimate, in return for which consideration, nobody's insurance company needed to be involved. Meaning the other driver's since Max himself was never insured. Once the money was in his pocket, he was disinclined to squander it by fixing up the car. Oh, he might replace a broken headlight, since state law required it, and if a side panel was badly dented, he'd pound it out himself, though the results were generally more grotesque than the original dent. The Dodge had been "repaired so many times that it resembled something built from scrap on a junk heap."

Rick Russo was an English and American literature instructor at the college level for eight years before he even began to think of himself as a writer. Which may explain why his most recent book, "Empire Falls," has as many characters as a Dickens novel, some of the wry humor of a Mark Twain story and some Fitzgerald-like commentary on the the American dream.

"I owe an awful lot more to those fine dead folks than I do to anybody who is alive and kicking," said Russo, who is 51. "My instincts as a storyteller are to go outward . . . My biggest influence was probably Dickens, in terms of those big canvases and lots of characters."

Indeed, "Empire Falls," Russo's fifth novel, is his most ambitious work to date. Some readers are disappointed that it isn't as tightly-woven as some of his other books, such as "Straight Man," or "Nobody's Fool," but it is also winning praise from book critics for its scope and the deftness with which Russo handles a narrative tale that spans three generations.

Russo will be at the Portland Public Library on Wednesday, May 30, at noon to talk about this new book.

At the heart of the novel, which was published in April, is a father-daughter relationship. But the cast of characters surrounding them, the flashbacks to events years ago and the plotlines culled from today's headlines all combine to give the novel an epic feel.

"What suprised me most about the book was how much it took out of me," said Russo, who started the novel in 1996 when he was living in Waterville and teaching at Colby College. Russo now lives in Camden, in an 1846 house with a harbor view, around the corner from the town library.

"I'm not sure I set out with the idea that this would be my most ambitious work," Russo said, as he relaxed one recent afternoon on the sun porch that faces the street. "But it didn't displease me to discover that the canvas had gotten so large. I like a book with some meat to it."

Long before Russo sits down to write a novel, he collects images and incubates ideas that might come together somehow, much like a quilter puts away loose pieces of fabric for the next project. One of those images was of Russo's youngest daughter lugging a heavy backpack full of books she didn't need home from school every day. Russo turned this image into a metaphor not only for the plight of the daughter in the novel, Tick, but also for Tick's father, Miles Roby, the main character, who has seemingly wasted his life shouldering a burden not of his making as well as a dream that may never come true.

"It seemed to me to be important to have at the center of this novel a person who works harder than anybody should have to and gets nowhere as a result," Russo said. "Or gets nowhere that most people in America seem to value anymore."

Another image Russo cultivated was actually an event: the closing of the Hathaway shirt factory in Waterville. The empty factory, which looms over the town in Russo's novel, was symbolic of the demise of smalltown life and the fading hopes dashed by forces over which the smalltown people have no control.

Russo says Empire Falls really isn't Waterville, however, any more than it is Lewiston or Millinocket or his hometown of Gloversville in upstate New York.

"People who are looking for local color, recognizable detail, are probably going to be disappointed," said Russo. "A lot of people think of me as a place-oriented writer but I've come to realize that what I am most interested in is class."

The struggles of the working class are at the heart of many of Russo's novels. And while Russo says his novels have long since ceased to be autobiographical, he still weaves into his stories the sensibilities he formed growing up in a working-class family in upstate New York. Russo's father was a construction worker and a bartender while his mother worked fulltime at the General Electric plant. His grandfather on his mother's side was a glove-cutter, his grandfather on his father's side a shoemaker.

Russo is senstive to the effects of class and social status on people's lives and their beliefs. But he said that it wasn't until he went away to the University of Arizona and then made a life for himself in academia that he was able to understand his background and place it in perspective.

For that reason, Russo, who spent 20 years as a college professor, admires his main character in Empire Falls, Miles Roby, and considers him a successful man, even though in society's current terms – and in his own mind – his life is a failure.

"He is a great father to his daughter and he runs an establishment that is still the moral center of this town," said Russo. "Yet he doesn't think of himself as a successful man and just about everybody else thinks of him as a failure. But I understood and sympathized with him. If Empire Falls is a kind of endangered species of a town, Miles is kind of an endangered species of a man. There used to be a lot more Miles Robys around."

"Empire Falls" is much more driven by narration than Russo's previous four books, yet it retains Russo's comic touch and his flair for dialogue. For instance, there's a priest who reveals his parishioner's deepest darkest secrets as soon as he leaves the confessional box, a painter who routinely paints people's windows shut and an aging health club owner whose license plate reads "The Silver Fox."

While his fans admire his flair for dialogue, Russo believes it is the easiest thing a writer does.

"Good dialogue is dialogue that makes you hear, not so much what people are saying, but what the character is feeling, what the emotional motivation is," said Russo, who still teaches summer seminars at the Warren Wilson College Master of Fine Arts program in North Carolina and tutors individual writing students from that program during the school year. "The trick to dialogue is just attitude. It's a very technical skill. "

Russo's next published work early next year will be a collection of short stories – something he has been working on for several years. He says he already has some images "simmering on a back burner" that may become his next novel. But he doesn't expect to have the time to start putting them down in draft form – which he still writes in longhand – until the first of next year.

Until then, he will be working on some Hallmark Hall of Fame television scripts and other screenwriting assignments, which he says keep the bills paid during the three or four years between novels. Russo's two daughters are in college and his wife Barbara works for an arts organization in Camden.

Russo got into screenwriting in 1994 when his novel, "Nobody's Fool," was in production. The director, Robert Benton, asked Russo to help with some changes to the script and the two became friends. They decided to collaborate on Russo's original screenplay, "Magic Hour," a character-driven detective story that became the movie, "Twilight, and was released three years ago.

Russo's efforts turning his novel, "Straight Man," into a movie haven't paid off yet. He has written nine drafts of the screenplay and while it looked as if Dreamworks would put the movie into production, the studio made "Wonder Boy," another story about academia, instead.

"It went about as far as a script can go without getting made," Russo said. "I'd still like to see Hank crawling around in those rafters."

As for "Empire Falls," Russo says there has been some interest in turning it into a movie, but he'd hate to be the screenwriter trying to condense the book into a two-hour film. He's happier writing novels, anyway.

"Screenwriting has been good for my novel writing because of the emphasis on structure," Russo said. "But novel writing is so much more satisfying to me. When you write a novel, you get to use all the tools in the toolbox."

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