Miles Roby Cannot Catch a Break

It's Empire Falls Fall Pt. 2!

After the first post of Empire Falls Fall, Molly said that Miles Roby reminded her of the Ben Affleck smoking meme and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. This man is constantly being inconvenienced, mistreated, and possibly even traumatized by memories of his childhood. He cannot catch a break!!

Here’s the thing about Miles, though: 80% of his problems are of his own making. Take the whole Cindy Whiting thing, for example. Cindy’s mother, Mrs. Whiting, is the owner of the Empire Grill. She’s the woman Miles keeps hoping will drop dead so he can inherit the grill and get on with his life. Well, did you know she has a daughter and did you know she’s disabled because she got hit by a car as a child and now she’s become the single most pathetic character ever committed to the page? The way we’re talking about disability here, whew! I know the year 2000 was a different time. I know Cindy Whiting is but one character in a book full of characters who are all massively flawed and often pathetic, but all that being said…the descriptions of her are painful to read. Also, she has severe mental health issues that have caused her to attempt suicide twice because Miles does not love her. And this isn’t an assumption. Miles and everyone in town know this for a fact. Miles’s terrible marriage to Janine was the only thing that gave him his relatively peaceful Cindy-free years, but now Cindy is back in town at her mom’s house and Miles is conveniently single and oh God, I could barely keep reading through all my cringing. Also Mrs. Whiting has a female cat named Timmy who openly hates Miles and spends every visit trying to maim him. Seems like some symbolism!

Cindy is like, “The doctors say I’m completely mentally stable now!” but her words are not the words of a mentally stable person. Would a mentally stable person say THIS?

“I still love you, Miles. You see that, don’t you? It’s the one thing the lithium can’t touch. Did you know that? The drugs wash into your brain and make things easier to bear, but they can’t touch your heart! They can’t alter what’s already there, Miles.”

Totally normal thing to say and I’m sure she’s doing fine. It’s almost romantic if you don’t think about it too much. I’m going to make a Valentine that says “The lithium can’t touch my feelings for you!”

Anyway, Miles has his little meeting with Mrs. Whiting and, as usual, Mrs. Whiting gives Miles a complete dressing down. She tells him that he married Janine out of fear to get away from her daughter, because Mrs. Whiting is 1) a hater with a lot of free time and 2) also completely correct in every assessment of Miles and that’s why he hates her so much. This is the part I underlined because I was like, “Ok, dang girl, rein it back in.”

“There’s that tiny voice in your head, the one you always turn a deaf ear to, which is forever asking, ‘Don’t I deserve a little happiness? Haven’t I been a good boy long enough?’ But then there’s the other voice, the one your mother was so instrumental in forming, that accuses you of selfishness, of not thinking of others…like poor, crippled Cindy Whiting. Doesn’t she deserve a little happiness? And this time around, you might just listen to that voice, because it’s the one that feels moral, or it would if it didn’t trail those nagging considerations of self-interest, because of course the money that would accompany such a marriage would be nice and you’re tired of straining to make ends meet….'What Would Jesus Do?’ What, indeed?”

Mrs. Whiting is like Ayn Rand over here. She probably has a copy of The Virtue of Selfishness on her nightstand. Miles is like, “I don’t have to sit here and take this” and then he shows Mrs. Whiting by…asking Cindy to go to the homecoming game with him??? Miles, no!!!

Me right now, thinking about all of Miles’s choices

Maybe I’m on Mrs. Whiting’s side here. Now on the side of “constantly berating her own daughter,” but on the side of wanting Miles to just make a decision for once. Miles is so upset by Mrs. Whiting’s words, of course, because they ring true to him! “He’d proved the very point he hoped to challenge. The middle road. He’d permitted guilt to maneuver him into offering a weak, hypocritical gesture he was pathetically unprepared to follow through with.” Mrs. Whiting may be a hater, but when she’s right, she’s right.

Poor Tick is simply a mirror of her own father in many ways. I guess it’s better she take after him than Janine (weird about food, marring an old guy). Her principal, whom I imagine looking like my favorite character actor Stephen Tobolowsky, asks her to please befriend perpetually silent loner John Voss. We already know that all the cool kids make fun of John Voss for being, well, a perpetually silent loner. Tick is her father’s daughter so she decides to make a half-hearted, easily deniable gesture to befriend John Voss and finds out that he’s not super interested in being friends and his lunch smells bad. Honestly, I hate it when Hollis makes tuna salad for lunch so I get this. Definitely one of the smelliest lunches. Things with John Voss don’t go great but they also don’t go terribly—Tick ends up getting him a job at the Empire Grill even though everyone’s like, “Why did you hire a goth kid who refuses to talk?” and then she gets back together with Zack Minty, noted Mean Football Guy who’s the son of noted Dim Police Guy Jimmy Minty. Tick, NO! These Robys simply cannot stop dating people they don’t even like out of some sense of what might seem like decency but is perhaps just passivity. I’m sensing a theme here!

Father Mark is still funny, which I guess is the burden he’s taken upon himself as the only gay man in town (although he does have some romantic intrigue that then leads to almost IMMEDIATE punishment in the form of Father Tom cruising off to Florida with Max Roby…uh-oh!). Janine is still going through it, and now she kind of knows she’s marrying a dud. David, Miles’s brother, is going OFF on Miles and being the voice of you, me, and every reader: “Take it, Miles. Take the damn wheel. If you crash”—he held up his damaged arm—”so what? Do it. If not for yourself, for Tick. She’s soaking up your passivity and defeatism every day. When she’s thirty, she’ll be saving all year long for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, because she’ll think it was the place you loved.”

I mean, David is right but also damn, dude. I’m starting to understand why Miles is so passive and defeated—between Mrs. Whiting, Janine, David, and Max he’s got someone yelling at him every day! His only safe space is hangin’ with Father Mark, where he still has to get yelled at by Father Tom. And I’m not sure that David’s metaphor fully works, because didn’t the “crash” he references happen because he was driving drunk? But we get it. Oh, and then Miles misses out on a possible chance to sleep with his Number 1 Crush Charlene because he’s still out there being passive, but in reality I think it would’ve been a big mistake to sleep with his most reliable waitress anyway.

There’s another absolutely NUTS italics interlude where we learn many things about Miles’s past, namely that he did very badly in Driver’s Ed by crashing into a garage. I also didn’t enjoy Driver’s Ed, although that was just because I had Car Trauma from being in a severe car accident the year before. I didn’t crash into a garage, though. I just almost ended up in several ditches (whoops). We learn that Max, unsurprisingly, is a wild driver and loves to just run into debris on the highway instead of driving around it. Now whenever I see junk on the highway, I’m going to think of Max Roby driving full speed over a cardboard box and, after Miles asks “What if that box had been full of rocks?” answering “What would a box full of rocks be doing sitting in the middle of the road?” We also get the backstory of Miles’s connection to Cindy and learn that she, hilariously, doesn’t understand the entire concept of poetry or what a metaphor is. Mrs. Whiting ends up teaching Miles to drive, and her method is unorthodox enough that I think he might’ve been better off just learning to drive from Max.

Italics interlude thankfully over, we enter Part Three and find our hero about to accompany Cindy Whiting to the homecoming game. Miles want to do the right thing, but he also sort of doesn’t want to do the right thing, and he’s wracked with anxiety over getting to the game early so that he can get Cindy up in the bleachers before anyone sees them together. Half the characters in this book are always talking about how Miles is such a good guy, and I read some marketing copy that described him as a decent man, but let me just say that I’m finding him endlessly frustrating. Just call me Mrs. Whiting because I’m turning into a hater. But, of course, this is the interesting thing about his character. It’s his very passivity that’s led him into this situation (the situation being…his entire life), and isn’t he just like so, so many real people? Do you ever see people talking about “shadow work” on Instagram? I think that fact that I’m so annoyed with Miles has something to do with my shadow self. I’m annoyed by what I know is within me!!!

Jimmy Minty shows up and sits with them and I’ve gotta say, Miles needs to lay off him a little bit. I wouldn’t say Jimmy is a good guy (we’ll get to that) but Miles is so rude to him. They’re frenemies, I guess. Cindy Whiting literally almost tumbles down the bleachers and Jimmy Minty is the one who catches her, not Miles. Speaking of which: Cindy’s built up as this comedically unbalanced character whose own pratfalls often lead to actual falls, but I still don’t understand how she almost fell down the bleachers simply by clapping enthusiastically.

Oh, and also Janine has her own ideas about how she needs to get to the game late so everyone can see her walk in because, have you heard? She’s lost weight and she needs everyone to see her halter top. But she’s upset because she just found out that Walt Comeau is sixty, not fifty as she previously believed. Oh, Janine. Her story really depresses me.

Then we get a Jimmy Minty interlude where he describes attempting to visit a friend at college, stumbling into a frat party, observing an unconscious girl being sexually assaulting, falling asleep in a bed of glass (??), and then driving home with the takeaway that college just wasn’t a place where he fit in. He’s been carrying this sense of rage the past twenty years, and Miles is gonna pay for it.

And THEN—big reveal alert—Miles discovers that his mother’s secret island boyfriend was none other than C.B. Whiting himself, now-deceased husband of his tormentor Mrs. Whiting, owner of the factory/mill that once employed the whole town. Miles is like 😧 and we’re immediately treated to another italics interlude, the contents of which are important but unfortunately impossible for me to recall as they are, again, in italics.

Oh yeah, and as I mentioned before, Father Tom and Max Roby stole a car and are on their way to Florida to…hook up with women, I guess? And then…the final italics interlude of this section. In this one, we learn the backstory of how Miles’s mother came to work for Mrs. Whiting, and how she lost “the last bloom of her womanhood” despite being “not yet forty.” I’m feeling like a desiccated husk right now, good Lord. Everyone in this book thinks of forty as being the age that your entire life is over. We learn more about Grace Roby’s time spent working for Mrs. Whiting, AKA the woman whose husband she had an affair with. This book is like White Lotus but about middle class people, which I mean as a compliment because usually I don’t care to watch/read Rich People Behaving Badly narratives. Give me Financially Struggling People Behaving Badly or Maybe Just Sadly.

Please tell me all your thoughts on this section of Empire Falls…what do YOU think of Miles? Which teenage boy is the bigger threat: John Voss or Zack Minty? Is Janine ever going to be happy? Will Tick stay in Empire Falls? Is something tragic going to happen to Cindy Whiting? Will Max and Father Tom ever return? And what the HECK is Jimmy Minty’s storyline going to be?? So many questions, but they’ll all be answered in the last section.

As always, thank you so much for reading and for being patient when I couldn’t post last week. The last post should be up next week, if everyone remains healthy. I appreciate all your free and paid subscriptions so, so much. Writing this newsletter is one of the biggest joys of my week. See you next week. xo