Wonderful Character Study

I moved away from central Maine several years ago after spending the first 18 years of my life there. This book made we want to pack up the car and drive "home" just as fast as I could after reading only the first couple chapters. Russo presents an incredibly realistic portrayal of the thoughts and lives of blue-collar locals in a dilapidated old mill town in greater Kennebec County. (There is no Dexter County as referred to in the book, but I think the area he's trying to portray is within the general vicinity of the state capital.)

Russo's use of the local vernacular is very good (to correct an earlier review, "sempty" is how Max would pronounce the word "seventy" with his Maine accent) and he picks up on cultural idiosyncrasies (the ubiquitous expensive car "with Mass plates" is, in fact, a local favorite) with surprising accuracy for a native New Yorker. All of the general hopes and fears of the people he describes are real. The thousands (well, maybe hundreds nowadays) of people who live in these towns think these exact same things and act these same ways every day. As an expatriate of the area, I was able to pick up on a lot of the "inside" references, but I would be afraid that those who have never lived in the state (and I don't count York county as part of the state) would miss something here, and would probably find the book less interesting. I highly recommend it to anyone who has ever lived in the area, especially those who have since moved away.

The last chapters book explode into a frenzy of action that doesn't really fit with the detailed, loping pace of the first several hundred pages. I got the sense that Russo couldn't really figure out how to end the story, since it never really started out down a particular course in the first place. I think a more vague, open-ended conclusion would have been a better fit with the overall style. That said, I was left with a strong urge to turn right back to the prologue and start all over again as soon as I turned the last page, even though it was 2:00 in the morning.