People may complain about living in small towns, but few readers would dispute that the oppressively brutal aspects of small-town life are often the stuff of great fiction. The stories of Frank O'Connor, William Trevor and John McGahern demonstrate that Irish writers have long known the nuances of the specific that somehow gives the rural an edge over the big-city palimpsest as a setting for fiction. Collectively, however, it is the US writers, of the South, North-East, Midwest and Carver's Pacific West Coast, who have most consistently and convincingly made art of the ordinary lives lived in remote hells where loneliness is as prevalent as privacy is elusive.
It takes immense skill and insight to give the ordinary and non-heroic a tragic dimension. Anne Tyler has been rightly acclaimed for her intuitive and sympathetically detached examination of human failure. Richard Russo is another American story-teller drawn to the workings of fate upon often curiously passive if always believable characters paralysed by circumstances not always of their own making.
Russo's fifth novel, Empire Falls, set in a decaying mill town in Maine, shows again that his work is brilliantly balanced between that of Tyler and Russell Banks. Russo's big-hearted, sprawling fiction is kindly, warm and busy, yet blunt enough to avoid the traps of cloying sentimentality. It is far superior to that of John Irving, with whom he has been unconvincingly compared.
Russo's prose is disarmingly ordinary, almost conversational. He is a maker not of great images but of lasting gestures, and is always alert to the epic weight of a small hurt or the ache of a memory as its meaning is finally understood.
Above all, he is a chronicler of community. Much of the skill of his old-fashioned story-telling shows itself in his gift for charaterisation. There are no intellectual games or linguistic tricks in Russo's work; he never tries to be clever or knowing, because he is more interested in truth and human dynamics. His use of language never intrudes because for him language serves the story - not the other way round. However, while he is unpretentious, he is far from folksy. His novels are 19th-century in scale - perhaps their length may discourage readers - yet he seldom wastes a word.
It is an injustice in our age of indiscriminate hype that Russo - whose first two novels, Mohawk (1986), which impressed the critics, and The Risk Pool (1989), were set in New York state, while Nobody's Fool (1993) marked his move to Maine, and was followed by Straight Man (1997) - has not yet acquired the status he deserves. The film version of Nobody's Fool, released in 1994 with an excellent script co-written by Russo, illustrates the humour and depth of his multi-layered fiction.
His new novel is another fine performance. As with much of Russo's work, it looks at disastrous father-and-son relationships. In ways, Scully, the feckless central figure of Nobody's Fool, a father who abandoned his wife and son, has been reversed in the character of Miles Roby, here the central character and a disappointed son. Miles could never depend on his wayward father, Max, a comic minor figure of Dickensian proportions, for whom petty theft, even from his son, is second nature; the chaos that surrounds him constitutes much of the wry humour running through the novel.
Miles is introduced as the mild-mannered 42-year-old father of Tick, a sweet, teenaged daughter who won't eat. He is also the soon-to-be-divorced husband of the bitter Janine, a former fatty now aerobically thin, sex-crazed and about to marry the local creep. The characterisation of Miles is as complete as it is sympathetic. Narrow-minded, vengeful Janine, for all her extremes and determination to stave off middle-age, emerges as a self-alienated character of surprising pathos. Russo may draw on stereotypes, but he works hard to avoid caricature, and succeeds.
Having spent most of his life hopelessly in love with the beautiful Charlene, a waitress in the diner he left college to run, Miles now works with his one-handed brother, David, wonders how it all went so wrong, and attempts to survive life as well as the desperate love offered by a crippled woman he likes but has never loved.
Just as Sully was haunted by the jeering ghost of his father, Miles, is increasingly preoccupied by the tragic and romantic ghost of his beautiful mother who, in her son's memory of her, becomes the heart of this multi-layered, dense and lively narrative.
A brutal backdrop to the present of Miles and his pals in the grill is the history of the Whiting family. This 19th-century merchant clan once owned the town and its population through its control of the textile and paper mills, as well as the shirt factory. While earlier Whiting males failed in killing their wives, the last of them, C.B., a failed artist with little interest in business, did succeed in killing himself, having years earlier, by accident, crippled his daughter.
His widow, once a tough girl from the less privileged side of town, has ably assumed the mantle of power, ruining several lives in the process. Now an old woman, Francine still remains in control of several of the characters as well as the town's business. Her handling of Miles throughout his life is not all that far removed from Miss Havisham's treatment of Pip in Great Expectations.
As the present-day story of life based around the Empire Grill unfolds, Russo goes deeper into the past and Miles's memories of his betrayed mother. These flashbacks imaginatively evoke the sense of an adult re-living a child's experience, slowly understanding in hindsight the sexual relevance of it all. Gradually the sad facts of his mother's doomed romance emerge, and with it the full extent of her lover's cowardice and Francine's cold revenge.
As with all of Russo's fiction, sub-plots abound; among the darker ones here is that of an abused boy whose final bid for help brings the novel to a terrifying climax. This is a big novel with a full canvas of human passions. Russo, a humane and traditional teller of truths, sustains his story and his readers.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
