Empire‘s Rise

The week before his most recent book, Empire Falls, was issued in paperback, Richard Russo spent a Monday afternoon playing tennis. He lost his match but came home to a Pulitzer Prize.

“My wife, Barbara, had been answering the phone nonstop,” Russo says. Late returning from the court, the author had missed the first wave of media calls.

“I knew it would be announced that day,” Russo says. “I thought, ‘Don’t be an idiot. Don’t wait for a call that’s not going to come. Go play tennis.’ When I’m playing a sport, I completely forget whatever else might be going on.”

But it’s Russo’s novels, comic and quietly profound, that show Wimbledon-ready intensity. It’s appropriate that the New York Times’ review of Falls — about a man in a crumbling factory town who struggles to overcome years of bad decisions — was penned by a movie critic; Russo’s dialogue has the memorable punch of a good screenplay. “I don’t work from an outline, and I don’t know where I’m going most of the time,” Russo says. “I’m wrong as often as I’m right, but in midcareer, I have a better nose for mistakes. I catch a whiff of that odor, and I don’t follow it as far as I used to.”

Now Russo is on the trail of an HBO production of Empire Falls, for which he will write the screenplay. Paul Newman will play the protagonist’s father, Max. The actor has said that he wants to retire after finding a great last part; Russo is too modest to speculate that he has created Newman’s swan-song character but says that “Max will fit him like an old shoe.”

Which is how longtime Russo readers tell him they feel. “Lately,” Russo says, “people take me by the elbow and say, ‘I’ve been reading you for years. I have not discovered you because of the prize and the press.'”