Richard Russo fans will recognize some familiar markers of his fiction in his latest novel, Under the Falls. The setting is a landscape of physical, economic, and emotional desolation — Stone Mountain, a hardscrabble, down-on-its-luck upstate New York town where the old lakeside amusement park rides are dismantled and rusting. This is “a place that doesn’t yield many good outcomes,” where Russo’s characters are merely scrambling to survive. Unhappy as they are, they are mostly unwilling or unable to leave.
The one exception is the novel’s putative protagonist, the successful rock musician Tyler Sinclair. As we quickly learn, Tyler fled Stone Mountain as a teenager, escaping his youthful mistakes and running toward his Nashville dreams. But how far has he really gone? Every band he has fronted has been named Stone Mountain. His songs mine memories of his hometown. And his most famous, “The Long Fall,” is a metaphorical evocation of a tragic incident from his adolescence — a friend’s catastrophic, paralyzing fall in which Tyler may have played some part.
Since his departure, Tyler has cut himself off from both his violent, dysfunctional family and his old pals, refusing even to open mail with a Stone Mountain postmark. If it were up to him, he would never return. But without consulting him, his manager, Jason, has booked a concert there to benefit Tyler’s paraplegic friend, Tim Dockery, known as Doc. After two years of pandemic lockdown, Jason argues that “it’s the perfect tune-up gig before we go somewhere that matters, an ideal place to work out the kinks.”
He could hardly be more mistaken.
Tyler’s first stop is an uncomfortable pre-show reunion with Doc — the first of many similarly awkward encounters. The occasion is an interview with an Albany TV station in which Doc recounts the circumstances of his accident. Now in a wheelchair, he lives in a trailer, drives a bright orange hearse with hand controls, and jokes, off camera, that his livelihood involves running “a vast criminal empire.” That illicit enterprise may not be especially lucrative. Doc needs the proceeds from the concert to finance pricey medical procedures for which Medicaid won’t pay.
After the interview, Doc warns Tyler that while he has forgiven his old friend for walking away, others in this flailing Adirondacks community have not. “It’s not just that you made all that money,” Doc explains. “It’s that you made it writing songs about us. About our lives. Where’s our cut? is how they look at it.”
One person with an entirely different reason to resent Tyler is Freddi, one of the town’s few Black residents, now Doc’s nurse and personal assistant. She is married to Curt, the Stone Mountain police chief, who was once her high-school boyfriend and Tyler’s best friend. Guilt over a clandestine romance with Freddi may have contributed to Tyler’s flight from Stone Mountain. When we learn that Freddi has a lighter-skinned son, Curtis Jr., the outlines of Russo’s melodramatic plot snap into focus.
Russo tells his story, with characteristic mastery, through alternating third-person narrators. Along with Curt and Tyler, the point-of-view characters include Beth — Tyler’s current girlfriend, writing partner, and bandmate, who is possibly ready for a solo career of her own — and Deb, a smart new addition to the local police force and, arguably, the novel’s real protagonist. Everett, a buffoonish though not entirely unsympathetic hooligan, also gets his say.
There is little of Russo’s signature nostalgia in Under the Falls. The book is set in our post-pandemic, Trump-inflected, opioid-addicted era, when everyone’s edges seem raw. Drug running drives Stone Mountain’s bruised economy. Police corruption enables it. And Everett, it turns out, is a J6er, part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol in protest of the 2020 presidential election results.
The novel’s symbolism leans toward the obvious. Doc’s hearse will prove an instrument of death. His childhood fall, onto a dam and then into the stream below, will be echoed in a cliffside car crash — a collision of past and present that is both literal and metaphorical.
As a realist, Russo has a formidable range. The brilliant academic satire of Straight Man (1997) is a long way from the blue-collar tapestry of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls (2001) or the romance-tinged mystery of Chances Are . . . (2019). While he has often depicted violence and mayhem, Under the Falls is unusually action-packed. Its (often improbable) twists and turns evoke the geography of Stone Mountain, with steep switchbacks revealing new vistas at each curve. The pacing, like the reckless driving in the book, is rapid. Missing, though, is some of the lovely, slow accretion of detail, not to mention the comic sensibility, that informs Russo’s best writing. The book’s origins may explain why.
Many of Russo’s earlier works have been adapted for television and film: Nobody’s Fool (1993) inspired one of Paul Newman’s most memorable late-life roles; Straight Man was the basis for the AMC series Lucky Hank, starring Bob Odenkirk; and Russo himself wrote the teleplay for HBO’s award-winning miniseries Empire Falls, featuring Newman’s final on-screen appearance.
Under the Falls began differently, not as a novel, but as a television project. As Russo explains in the acknowledgments, “Like so many promising projects at the time, it did not survive the WGA writers’ strike.” As Russo transitioned from screen to page, he retained bold plot strokes and multiple cliffhanger moments.
Another artifact of the book’s beginnings may be the recognizably film noir character of Freddi: a seductress loved by two men, betrayed by one of them, treacherous to each in turn, and ultimately doomed. Under the Falls includes a grotesque scene in which Freddi wreaks an ambiguous sexual revenge on a captive Tyler for his past abandonment of her. Despite their marital rifts, Curt, who gives nearly everyone the benefit of the doubt, still believes in her “good heart.” But whatever her past wounds, Freddi remains a villainous soul, the novel’s darkest character. And Russo, in giving her no chapter of her own, declines to inhabit her point of view.
What about Tyler? Fixated on himself to the exclusion of others, he is not exactly a likable figure. And notwithstanding his rock-star status, Russo doesn’t endow him with the charisma of an antihero. “He is both at the center of things and somehow relegated to the periphery,” Tyler says of himself at one point. Like so many of Russo’s characters, he seems a victim both of circumstances — he chose neither his family of origin nor his birthplace — and of his own questionable choices. For the latter, he is amply punished, perhaps even more so than he deserves.
It is Deb, the novice police officer, who represents the book’s moral center. As another of the novel’s and town’s few Black characters, she serves as a mirror image, or counterweight, to Freddi. Tasked with investigating the car crash, Deb uncovers more than she bargained for and wrestles with whether to betray her mentor, Curt, in service of the greater good.
The book’s plotting has something of a musical feel. Its incidents mount, like a series of chords, toward increasing dissonance. Tyler’s anxieties about his return to Stone Mountain prove prophetic. The initially triumphant benefit concert erupts into violence at the sudden news of Doc’s death, making the event moot. Tyler is, at first, exhorted to play “The Long Fall” in Doc’s honor, then forced offstage by a volley of eggs. Far more severe physical and emotional challenges await before Russo finally affords him a modicum of peace, redemption, and hope for the future.
What are we to conclude from all of this?
At the heart of the book is the question of America’s postindustrial decline, how it ruins small towns, and weighs on, deforms, and sometimes uncovers character. This is, of course, another recurring Russo theme. So too is the inevitable loss of childhood innocence, yet another unfortunate fall. “You can’t turn back the clock,” Freddi tells Curt. “You can’t make us innocent again, like we used to be.”
Russo suggests, too, that it is impossible to outrun the past, that the forces of family and geography are like a dragnet. “Look, the problem isn’t leaving,” Doc tells Tyler. “The problem is that you end up right back here.”
In his earlier novel Chances Are . . ., Russo voiced an even more existential take on the complicated balance between choice and fate, a formulation that also applies in Under the Falls. “Yank out a thread from the fabric of human destiny,” he wrote, “and everything unravels. Though it could also be said that things have a tendency to unravel regardless.”
Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, has been a three-time finalist for the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, Slate, and other publications.
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