After honeymooning in Maine and eating at the same restaurant as Paul Newman, I had to pick up a copy of Empire Falls from my local library. So far, it's absolutely splendid. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel was written as an elegy to the American blue collar man and his working-class ambitions, but I find that like many works published around the millennium, it serves as a fascinating time capsule to pre-9/11 life in America.
The characters feel so real, and I love how the main character is cast as sort of the wise everyman, but he completely lacks in self-awareness and has at least up until this point in the novel been victim to his own fate and unable to accept that he deserves a better life. Richard Russo, the author, has really made the characters represent the American class struggles writ small.
Hopefully the back-half of the book is as gripping as the first. If anyone hasn't read it yet, then it's highly recommended.
