Empire Falls (2001)

Richard Russo's big fat Pulitzer winner has any number of things going for it. It is utterly engaging, it is often very funny, and the last image is crystalline, if slightly overwrought, a perfect note of olde New England gothic. It is contemporary, but grounded. And it builds to an insane momentum that kept me anyway up way past my bedtime one night in a fever to finish it. I liked his earlier Straight Man nearly as much, maybe more, and recommend them both with little hesitation. The hesitation is a matter of something not so easily identified. I shouldn't be complaining when a novelist does his job so well, but for all its complexity it all resolves rather neatly. Not every last thread here is tied up, but those that aren't (e.g., whither Miles?) feel calculatedly ambiguous, tidy setups for reading groups (and/or American lit courses if things go well). The artfulness sometimes feel too artful, the angst almost pro forma, and the bonhomie forced. But now I'm churlish, complaining because it's too good. It's true that there are perhaps overly generous portions of feel-good moments. But the countervailing forces are often so strong that I was relieved to be able to remind myself that Russo is a writer of comedies of manners. If some things are going to sting, nothing's going to be traumatic. It's almost perfect on the slow dissolution of the mid-20th-century American postwar economy, the way all those small towns collapsed under the weight of their own naïve optimism (as we often view it now), as captains of industry pulled the rug out from under them by degrees. That is clearly the novel's great strength, and accounts for much of how it came to win all its various prizes. (That and the fact that it's olde New England, which is a topic for another time.) The characters are richly imagined and the complexities of the plot unfold with barely a misstep. Virtually every new chapter grabs hold hard and propels the momentum further, which is exactly how you go about keeping somebody up overnight. If it seems vaguely overwrought in its totality, as with that final image, it's still hard to complain that it doesn't get just about everything just right.

In case it's not at the library.