You End Up Right Back Here

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.