Empire Falls

‘“I want to live there,’ she [Tick] confessed, like someone who saw no harm in confessing a sin she was never likely to have the opportunity to commit.”

This comparison emphasizes Tick’s innocence, as she naively expresses a desire that, because of class and financial barriers, is not likely to pass. The sentence also conflates Tick’s secular desire for religious confession, establishing one of the author’s main themes throughout the book.

“But on other occasions—and there had been several of these—when Miles himself had become discouraged and offered the same argument to his employer, Mrs. Whiting quickly retreated and urged him not to give up, reminding him that the Empire Grill was a landmark, that it was the only non-fast food establishment in town, and the Empire Falls, if its residents were to remain at all hopeful about the future, needed the grill to survive, even if it didn’t thrive.”

The Empire Grill itself is a symbol of Empire Falls. Hardly successful and clinging to existence, it nevertheless maintains its status as a representation of what Empire Falls used to be, and thus of what it could become again. It is an emblem of hope and failure simultaneously.

“By idealizing the rest of the town, she had successfully obscured the truth—that its wealth and vitality had been bled dry by the generations of a single family. A cynical interpretation perhaps, but it also explained why the house C. B. Whiting had built across the river was not represented on the model at all.”

Miles observes the scale model that Mrs. Whiting has had commissioned of the town of Empire Falls. A literal whitewashing of the truth, Mrs. Whiting has had her husband’s existence wiped out, as she has also sanitized and idealized the community. It is as if the Whitings—and their factories’ demise—are not implicated in the present state of affairs at all.

“In the dream she’s safe as long as she can hold the snake up near its head, but each time it manages to slither through her grip. When it turns to look at her, she wakes up with a start. From this dream Tick concludes that she’s learned something useful: whatever means you harm will look you over first.”

This clearly foreshadows the horrific shooting that will take place in the school later. Tick has been asked to paint something out of one of her recurring dreams, and she chooses to depict this snake, which also carries connotations of religious transgression. It is as if John is the snake who later enters the Eden of Empire Falls High School to shatter its innocence. Tick is one of the few who look John Voss directly in the eye.

“She was right, of course. In the deepest sense, he hadn’t loved her. Not the way he’d intended to. Not as he’d sworn he would before God and family and friends, and this simple truth embarrassed him too deeply for anything like analysis. No, he hadn’t loved her, and he didn’t know why.”

Miles is unable to reconcile his relationship with Janine. He particularly struggles to explain why he was unable to love her the way he felt he ought. While Mrs. Whiting suggests that Miles married Janine to avoid feeling obligated to marry her disabled daughter, Cindy, there is also the example of his parent’s marriage—Max might have loved Grace but was pathologically unable to show it—as well as his buried feelings of guilt over his mother’s lost opportunity to run away with her lover, Charlie Mayne. Love, for Miles, is intimately bound up with guilt and self-sacrifice.

“A bar could become a desert when you’re broke, its beer spigots a mirage. When you finally arrived at the oasis you could tell yourself not to drink too deeply, but a body parched so long by the desert sand has its own needs, its own devices, and Max was just glad his body hadn’t demanded the whole glass Horace had bought him.”

In Max Roby’s interior monologue, the reader gets a sense of his deep-seated addiction. While the author does not delve too deeply into Max’s psyche—and he mostly plays his alcoholism for laughs—it is clear that addictive behavior is replicated throughout the book. Max’s son, David, becomes a person with alcoholism, losing most of an arm in a drunk driving accident, and one might argue that Miles himself is addicted to food—and to guilt.

“It just went to prove, people said, that God didn’t play favorites. He didn’t love the rich more than the poor, not really, and it took something like this to demonstrate this oft-doubted truth.”

The god-fearing folk of Empire Falls take Cindy’s accident to mean that God’s justice is mysterious and his workings unfathomable. Ironically, it is a source of comfort that someone like Cindy, rather than Miles, was struck down in such a tragic manner. After all, the two were born on the same day in the same hospital; there is a certain sense of cosmic justice that the rich girl was afflicted, while the poor boy was not. Tragedy is an equal opportunity leveler.

“Tick’s strategy for dealing with lying adults is to say nothing and watch the lies swell and constrict in their throats. When this happens, the lie takes on a physical life of its own and must be either expelled or swallowed.”

Tick’s astute observations of the inherent hypocrisies in adult behavior take on a life of their own. In this personification of “the lie,” the reader imagines an imp—to connect to the religious imagery that runs throughout the book—consumed by the liar. It will either be unleashed upon the unsuspecting, or buried deep within the self, potentially corrupting the soul.

“As his ‘date’ with Cindy Whiting approached, Miles had been thinking a lot about life’s inequities and his mother’s tendency to take them to heart and to act upon her belief that we were all put on earth to make things a little more fair. It was Tick who’d made the request to hire that hopeless, bedraggled boy, but it was his mother, no doubt, who’d whispered in his ear when his instincts had argued against doing so.”

Miles’s motivations spring out of feelings of guilt and obligation, passed down to him via his mother and the Catholic church. He hires John because Tick’s kind nature—also inherited from her father via his mother—wants to help him. But, as with his awkward relationship with Cindy Whiting, it is Grace Roby’s teachings that cement his decision.

“In fact, he’d not been able to rise further than his knees there in the steeple, knowing that if he stood it would be possible to tumble over the waist-high railing. Even from this penitent posture he’d caught a quick glimpse of the landscape below, extending all the way across the river to Mrs. Whiting’s house and beyond, and suddenly he wondered whether Cindy Whiting, if she could see him frozen in this cowardly posture, clutching the railing with both hands, might not be able to rid herself of her lifelong affection.”

Miles’s debilitating fear of heights forces him into a penitent position: He has not been able to scale the heights of success, nor has he been able to ascend spiritually. He is haunted by the ghost of his mother and her lover, which keeps him mired in the past and worried about the future. Miles also worries he will pass his illogical fears on to his daughter. In one incisive passage, Miles’s lack of material success, his spiritual crisis, and his entanglement with Mrs. Whiting are brought together.

“Since losing her factory job and going to work for Mrs. Whiting, his mother seemed different, as if she had crossed over into some new place in life.”

The phrase “crossed over” resonates with meaning: it is often used to metaphorically describe the passage of a person from life into death. As such, this signifies not only that Grace has moved on to a new phase of her life; it also signifies that she has symbolically died—she is dead to her former family—in order to do so. This resembles a form of martyrdom, as Grace becomes a Christ-like figure in her sacrifice, foreshadowing her early, actual death.

“When he bent over to retrieve the cane, he could see her face, and it was so full of hope and joy that Miles was tempted to remain where he was. Or, better yet, to bolt. Once the game was over, surely someone would see her sitting there alone at the top of the visitor’s section and bring her home.”

In contrast to his mother’s extreme commitment to duty and self-sacrifice, Miles has his limits—though he does not bolt). He rescues Cindy Whiting’s cane from beneath the bleachers at the homecoming game, and her beatific expression at his efforts unnerves him. He is but a facsimile of the Christ figure, saving a cane rather than a person, and doing so with great trepidation.

“After all, what was the whole wide world but a place for people to yearn for their hearts’ impossible desires, for those desires to become entrenched in defiance of logic, plausibility, and even the passage of time, as eternal as polished marble?”

While Miles refers here to Jimmy Minty’s stated desire of friendship, this thought encapsulates one of the central themes of the book: that of thwarted desires, impossible dreams, and inevitable regrets. Still, as the author points out, there is always room for hope; even in Empire Falls, as the ending suggests, one can carve out a good life.

“For reasons that mystified Miles, the series apparently had a cheering effect on the citizenry. People actually seemed to enjoy recalling that on a Saturday afternoon forty years ago Empire Avenue was bustling with people and cars and commerce, whereas now, of course, you could strafe it with automatic weapons and not harm a soul.”

Miles refers to “The Way We Were” series in the local newspaper. It is with great irony that people are bolstered by reminders of their past glory, rather than disheartened by their current reality. This series is where Miles finally grasps the truth of his mother’s affair and its continuing impact on his entire life.

“He’d lied in confession yesterday, and knew better than to invite God into his impure body. On the other hand, since he had gone to confession, it would seem strange if he didn’t take communion, so he received the wafer on a tongue so dry with guilt and shame that instead of dissolving, it remained there like a scrap of thin cotton cloth.”

The narrator invokes the fear and anxiety of a young person confronted with matters of spiritual importance, overwhelmed by authority and confused by complexity far beyond his years. It also employs a deft simile at the end, a communion wafer turned into inedible, insoluble cloth.

“The world, he now understood, was a physical, not a moral order. Nobody got sick and died as a consequence of sinning. He’d been suspecting as much, but now saw it clearly and realized that part of him had known it all along.”

Miles has been told his mother’s frequent bouts of nausea are the result of her pregnancy, not of an incurable illness. He attempts to separate his spiritual beliefs—his mother has sinned; therefore, she is being punished by illness—from his logical understanding of the material world. However, part of him never fully relinquishes this notion, and he admits to Father Mark that he always felt as if her affair had brought upon her deadly cancer.

“The problem with the contemplative life was that there was no end to contemplation, no fixed time limit after which thought had to be transformed into action. Contemplation was like sitting on a committee that seldom made recommendations and was ignored when it did, a committee that lacked even the authority to disband.”

This passage refers to Father Mark, but it is also applicable to Miles. The book is interspersed with long sections of Miles’s memories, implying that he remains mired in contemplation of them. He cannot move forward with his life until he can reconcile these thoughts into decisive action.

“That she ultimately returned to both her husband and her faith seemed far more significant, and he said as much to Miles, who confessed his lifelong worry that the intensity of his mother’s brief joy had been somehow the root cause of the illness that killed her a decade later.”

Father Mark tries to console Miles regarding his continuing inability to separate his mother’s pleasure from her ultimate pain. It also doubles as an explanation for Miles’s lack of achievement and fear of intimacy: if he allows himself to experience that kind of joy, it might very well kill him, as it did his mother.

“Miles would have liked to deny the truth of that, at least for himself, but he couldn’t. He’d meant to forgive his brother, maybe even imagined he had. He’d also meant to learn to trust him, but instead merely fell into the habit of waiting for him to [mess] up again, even though he hadn’t for a long time.”

Miles refers here to David’s addiction. While David has been sober for quite a long time, it is difficult for Miles to believe he will remain so. There is the implication that David relapsed many times previously, attending multiple rehabs along the way. There is also the figure of Max Roby, Miles’s irredeemable father who has alcoholism, to give him pause. It also speaks to the problem of forgiveness, which runs throughout the book: Miles must forgive himself for his mother’s death, and he must extricate himself from the toxic faux-forgiveness of Mrs. Whiting.

“As a rule, Tick leans toward believing that there is no God, but she isn’t so sure at times like this, when pockets of meaning emerge so clearly that they feel like divine communication. She realizes it’s entirely possible that this is simply Tick communicating with Tick, but she is willing, largely in deference to her father, who believes in God and wishes she did too, to keep an open mind.”

Concerns of spirituality pepper the book, and Tick too contemplates the nature of the universe. It is notable that this passage occurs as she is painting the dying flowers in art class, with their “sweet odor of corruption and imminent death” (385). This is the penultimate passage in the classroom before the shooting, and it foreshadows the carnage to come.

“And no sooner did this thought occur to her than she was visited by a horrible mental picture of her daughter walking down the roadside at night, weighed down as usual, but not by her backpack. This time the load was Janine herself, and her daughter was headed for the dump.”

Janine agonizes over the combative relationship she has fostered with Tick. In this metaphor, Janine recognizes that her emotional baggage has now been transferred to her daughter. The issues with both unhealthy relationships and weight have been passed down.

“She smiled appreciatively. ‘Payback is how we endure, dear boy. Now, before you say another word in anger, for which I should have to punish you, you’ll want to stop and consider not just your own future but your daughter’s.’”

This reveals much about Mrs. Whiting’s character and intentions. It also indicates that she has consciously been punishing the son for the sins of the mother. Mrs. Whiting’s mercy is actually retribution, and she intends to exact its toll into the next generation—a mirror of the generational inheritance of the Whiting men marrying ruthless women.

“Perhaps there was no justification for Miles’s belief that the real buyer of the church was Mrs. Whiting, or that she would maintain residence in one of the condos, so as to spend at least part of the year living in the heart of something he’d loved before she managed to seize and corrupt it. Power and control, again. And no matter how little basis he could claim for his belief, he truly did believe it.”

Miles is now clearly aware of Mrs. Whiting’s intentions and her schemes, both business and personal. For her, there is no clear separation. Mrs. Whiting’s residence in Miles’s—and Grace’s—beloved church is nothing short of a desecration of its holy space.