Earlier this month, Richard Russo was awarded the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for his novel Empire Falls. But the writer, who appears at the University of Cincinnati today, could just as easily have won the award for any one of his previous four novels: Mohawk (1986), The Risk Pool (1988), Nobody's Fool (1993) and Straight Man (1997).

IF YOU GO

Richard Russo will read from his work 8 p.m. today in Room 127 of McMicken Hall at the University of Cincinnati. The event is free and open to the public. Information: (513) 556-1570.     He will return to Cincinnati June 11 for two events at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Norwood:     • 6 p.m. book club discussion; reservations required: e-mail Meg Cannon at mcannon@josephbeth.com or call (513) 731-7770, ext. 114.     • 7 p.m. signing and discussion; open to the public, no reservations required.

        Part of Mr. Russo's success has to do with his affinity for Charles Dickens. Probably too much has been made of Mr. Dickens' influence upon Mr. Russo, but as is the case with most easy comparisons, it has merit.

        Like Mr. Dickens, Mr. Russo writes sprawling novels with complicated plotlines and characters who aren't entirely lovable but aren't exactly loathsome, either. This is one of the strengths of Mr. Russo's work: his heroes and villains exist in the uncomfortable world between heroism and villainy in which most of us exist.

        This is certainly true of Sully in Nobody's Fool, a career drunk, philanderer and deadbeat father. Mr. Russo doesn't downplay Sully's considerable limitations, but neither does he neglect to show us that Sully can be honorable, thoughtful and extremely good company.

        Similarly, Sam Hall in The Risk Pool is so far from perfect as a father, husband, businessman and citizen that he couldn't even begin to describe what perfect might look like. But that's the point: like Mr. Dickens, Mr. Russo finds his characters engaging in their imperfections, not despite them.

        And like Mr. Dickens, Mr. Russo has an exceptionally good time creating and examining his characters' less-than-ideal lives: even when his characters are being truly mean to each other, even when they are making each other and themselves miserable, there is a fondness in and around their misery. It is a fondness born not out of sentiment or nostalgia for lives harder than our own but a fondness that recognizes that part of what makes people beautiful is their affinity for ugliness.

        Perhaps this is why, in Mr. Dickens and in Mr. Russo, the reader both finds the world of the novels familiar and yet slightly estranged from the world we know — more bizarre, more joyous, more resilient in the face of desperation. Perhaps it is also why both writers have been successful with mainstream and literary readers, critics and booksellers.

Richard Russo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, "Empire Falls," sits in front of Camden Harbor, Maine. (AP photo) | ZOOM |

        But to make too much of Mr. Russo's Dickensian tendencies is to miss his timeliness, to miss what makes his such a vital voice in contemporary literature.

        Whereas Mr. Dickens' characters are forced to work in degrading, life-shortening conditions, Mr. Russo's characters long for such employment. Mr. Russo's great gift to present day readers is the way he examines the many forgotten, failed American working-class lives at the end of our most prosperous century. All of Mr. Russo's novels are set in small, fading industrial towns. Mohawk, The Risk Pool, and Nobody's Fool are set in the mill and tannery towns of upstate New York where Mr. Russo was raised. Empire Falls takes place in a mill town in rural Maine, not too far removed from Mr. Russo's current home in coastal Maine. Straight Man occurs in a backwater Pennsylvania college town.

        Thus, his work unfolds against a backdrop of played out jobs and boarded up businesses and slow, grinding decline, far from the spectacular rise and fall and rise again of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

        While there is high comedy in all of Mr. Russo's work (the scene in Straight Man where William Henry Devereaux, Jr., ends up holding a duck hostage is one of the most memorable comic set pieces in contemporary literature), there is also heartbreak, lots of it. Part of the great pathos of Mr. Russo's work is that his characters — who know better than to expect their (often self-made) bad luck to change — still hope, beyond reason, that good times are ahead.

        For example, Empire Falls, Maine squats in the shadow of the hulking shells of an abandoned textile mill and shirt factory. In fact, the Empire Diner (Miles Roby is its proprietor and the novel's main character) is directly down the main drag from these abandoned buildings, and so each time Roby and his customers and family look up from their greasy, artery clogging eggs and homefries, they see the place that employed their ancestors and that should be employing them.

        Grim? You bet. Yet Mr. Russo's characters always find ways to relieve the grimness. In the case of Empire Falls, every year a rumor flies that investors have been spied visiting the factories and surely are on the verge of buying them and thus reversing the town's fortunes. This is highly unlikely (as one character says sarcastically, “Hey, it's clear to me. They came to invest millions. For a while they were thinking about tech stocks, but then they thought, Hell, no. Let's go into textiles. That's where the real profits are”) yet most of the characters take heart in the prospect, which makes it all the more heartbreaking when, inevitably, nothing happens.

        Does this stop them from believing the next year's rumors? No. Nor does it keep them from being the sometimes awful, sometimes good, always provocative characters they remain in and around the hope.

        In this way, Mr. Russo has dedicated himself to illuminating, without sentimentalizing, small town industrial life? — a world we Americans care less and less about aside from our nostalgia about how our lives or our parents' lives used to be before we fled these small towns.

        But Mr. Russo doesn't merely shed light on these ignored towns and their citizens: he makes the world of his novels better than our own even as it is more desperate, makes the world more hopeful than our own even if the hope is deceiving.

        The writer and philosopher William Gass said that the writer's duty was to “add something to the world which the world can then ponder in the same way it ponders the world — to add objects to the world worthy of love.” Mr. Russo has made a career of adding such objects to the world. The Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls simply confirms what readers have known for years: that Richard Russo's work is worthy of love.

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