I have read all 10 of Richard Russo’s novels and all four of his short story collections. I would recommend them to any reader, any time. So, please believe me when I say that I was befuddled when reading Russo’s new novel, Under the Falls, and experienced a creeping sense of disconnection and dissatisfaction ... This other book simply did not work for me. It jettisoned everything I thought was coming for something else. Even as I adjusted to what the book was attempting, it all felt at odds with Russo’s amazing gift for character interiority grounded in place.
I saw that Tyler could just as easily have been a mixed martial artist or an Instagram influencer, as the specifics of his character have nothing to do with the book’s simple goal. After the concert, a major accident upends Tyler’s life, and all that matters from Page 56 on are some secrets that will be revealed in dribs and drabs over the next 180 pages ... In TV and movies, the race of an actor can signal nuances of characterization, even if it isn’t explicitly addressed. It’s more disconcerting when a novelist points out a character’s race multiple times and conveys that it distances her from others, yet never attends to her Blackness in meaningful detail. One can engage with race (or not) and end up missing the mark. But starting and stopping short has far worse effects.
This is Russo’s shortest novel and his most clipped and dramatic one, too ... An unusually brisk thriller that plunges into Russo’s signature exploration of small-town decline, resentment, and guilt.
Over time, Russo’s work has become less uproariously funny and more ruminative. In his Washington Post review of 2023’s Somebody’s Fool, Ron Charles, one of our best critics of fiction, wrote that Russo 'has become our national priest of masculine despair and redemption.' The new novel, Under the Falls, is a would-be sermon from this vein of prophecy ... Despite its conventional materials and approach, Under The Falls is insightful and well-written. Sentences unfurl smoothly and the setting is evocatively rendered. A crisp present tense third person voice carries us along ... But the novel bored me and ultimately left me cold. Under The Falls is one of Russo’s shortest books and yet it doesn’t move swiftly or suspensefully to its conclusion. The mystery isn’t very mysterious. The secrets are obvious from early on; in an unfortunate kind of dramatic irony, the reader is waiting for the characters to catch up. Those characters never compelled my interest, and I never felt moved by their plights ... a minor, inoffensive addition to the illustrious Russo canon.
At its best when he leans into the complexity of the homecoming theme ... A thriller, but at its best it’s concerned about that matter of haunting — about whether the child can ever be reconciled with the adult, and who gets hurt along the way.
Russo’s dark and brooding novel is cinematically lush and emotionally potent, a shrewd treatise on the perils of reunion, remorse, and the quest for redemption.
Vivid ... Despite the occasional implausibility...Russo successfully manages the novel's plot twists to maintain the balance between a character-driven story and the tropes of traditional crime novels.
A wild ride of a literary thriller ... Russo excels at drawing flawed characters who experience moments of deep reckoning, along with moments of grace, big and small ... Devastating.
