The Tuesday Review
Twenty-five years ago, Richard Russo dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Empire Falls, to the filmmaker Robert Benton.
In an interview around that time, Russo said Benton had changed his life by getting him into screenwriting, and he wanted him to know there were no hard feelings.
The boundary between novels and screens is now so permeable that it’s hard to remember a time when producers and directors weren’t scouring bookshelves for their next adaptation. But at the turn of the century, Russo was something of a career-blending trendsetter, frequently setting aside the difficult work of writing a novel for the relative pleasure of working on a script. Some of those scripts have never risen off the page, but millions of viewers have enjoyed Empire Falls, Twilight (not that one), The Ice Harvest, and other original and adapted stories.
His latest book, Under the Falls, rowed upstream. It’s a novel based on a script for a proposed TV show that sank during the 2023 writers’ strike. Overinterpreting that origin is tempting; this is Russo’s shortest novel and his most clipped and dramatic one, too. The propulsive requirements of the screen shape the flow of fiction in distinctive ways, privileging conflict and action, eliminating digressions, and bringing characters’ motives rapidly and explicitly to the surface. The result is an unusually brisk thriller that plunges into Russo’s signature exploration of small-town decline, resentment, and guilt.
The story opens with an aerial flyover gliding up Interstate 87 through upstate New York. “If the Northway is all you know about the Adirondacks, you might very well conclude that prosperity and good fortune are a matter of altitude,” Russo writes, “but you’d be wrong.” Head up Route 29 and you’ll find Stone Mountain, a dying community pockmarked by closed storefronts and cabins strewn with tires and trash.
“People from around here don’t go out into the world and become rich and famous,” he writes. “With one exception.”
You might very well conclude that Russo is referring to himself. But you’d be wrong again. That exception is a rock star named Tyler Sinclair, Stone Mountain’s famous son. After 18 years away, Tyler is finally returning home to launch his next tour and album. The concert — initially planned by his staff without his knowledge — is a benefit performance for Tyler’s old friend, Tim “Doc” Dockery, who’s permanently disabled.
When they were 11, the boys were playing on a rope swing at the Falls. Doc swung too far out over the water and dropped down on an iron pipe that ran along the dam. Tyler saved his friend from drowning, but he was also the kid who launched Doc on that rope, and for 18 years he’s been trying to reconcile his role as hero and villain.
Apparently, he’s not the only one.
When Tyler’s limo delivers him to Doc’s derelict trailer for their happy pre-concert reunion, Doc assures him, “I just wanted you to know there are no hard feelings.... If you don’t blame yourself, I’m glad.”
“Why would I blame myself?”
It’s an awkward conversation so perfectly drawn it’ll unearth any buried sins in your own past and make you squirm. Russo pits Doc’s nonchalance against Tyler’s desperate efforts to defend himself without sounding defensive. But clearly, Doc is picking at a scab of denial and enforced amnesia. After all, Tyler never wanted to return to Stone Mountain, but that’s the name of his band. He doesn’t want to think about his friend’s accident, but his greatest hit is “The Long Fall.” In Russo’s telling, he’s a slippery mess of contradictions and self-denials, facing his homecoming concert like a return to the site of a crime.
And almost immediately, old tragedies reverberate in the present day with new ones. The night of the concert, three people are dead.
Accidents? Murders?
Making those determinations is up to Tyler’s childhood friend Curt, now serving as the town’s chief of police — and another mess. Indeed, there are enough emotionally wrecked men in this novel for a whole support group.
In short chapters that rotate quickly from character to character, Russo rummages around in the dusty attic of Stone Mountain, where poverty and addiction have rotted the timbers. It’s a cast of damaged folks all trying to solve or cover up the deaths triggered by Tyler’s homecoming. Despite Curt’s impression that he’s in charge of the town, his wife — Lady Macbeth of the fentanyl trade — is the real force here, a creature of seething ambition and rage whom some great actress would have made the star of the show.
It’s easy to imagine that the demands of streaming TV aren’t the only forces driving this novel. The intensity of Tyler’s guilt — for leaving, for surviving, for succeeding — seems strangely masochistic. If Russo isn’t an actual rock star, he’s certainly a literary one who created a good life by writing about the people he, too, left behind in dying Rust Belt towns. The penance he demands from Tyler, in a plot that grows increasingly sordid and deadly, feels by the end almost expiatory in its intensity.
Richard Russo reflects on his hometown’s shifting response to his success:
Postscript. In 1997, when I was a high school English teacher tired of grading papers, a student’s mother suggested I try reviewing books.
I regularly read reviews in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, but for all I knew they just sprouted up spontaneously like mushrooms on the morning lawn.
With what-the-heck optimism I’d never shown before, I went to Library Ltd., a massive indie bookstore in St. Louis — now long dead, of course — and looked at the novels on the New in Fiction shelf.
One of the books was Richard Russo’s Straight Man. Its plot about an English teacher railing against the inanities of the academy appealed to me.
Reader, I reviewed it.
A few weeks later, The Christian Science Monitor bought that review for $150.
I didn’t know it then, but Straight Man sent me careening into a whole nuther career as a book critic.
On Aug. 20, I’ll be in conversation with Richard Russo at the Martha’s Vineyard Author Series (tickets). It will be nice to finally meet the man who changed my life, and let him know there are no hard feelings.◆
Under the Falls, by Richard Russo (Knopf, 256 pp., $30)
Previous review: Bitter Honey
Jennie Durant’s fascinating new book explores the hidden costs of killing the bugs we hate — and the ones we need.
Grateful to that parent whose suggestion set you on your way as an excellent reviewer!
Ron—your insights, wickedly skillful reviews, and unexpected Friday forays lift my spirits each Tuesday and Friday. So happy to follow your travels and active interview opportunities. You remain such a gift! Now to get my copy of the new Russo—you have quashed here other tepid, indifferent notices of this book. It’s you I trust.