A curiosity: If you stick a bunch of crabs in a bucket, the ones on top will try to climb out only to be pulled back in by the ones below them. So it is in a little one-stoplight Maine town, a place that Miles Roby, the protagonist of Richard Russo’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Empire Falls, has been trying to leave for years.

Miles, “the nicest, saddest man in all of Empire Falls,” stays in part through sheer inertia, but also to be with his daughter, an artistically inclined teenager nicknamed Tick. Miles had gone away to college 20-odd years before, but his mother’s terminal illness brought him back, though she pushed him away. “Your being here is killing me,” she tells him, and while Miles blames her death on her indifferent lover, he knows there’s something to it.

The late scion of the town’s first family had tried to go away, too, to become an artist. Called back to take over the family’s textile and lumber businesses, he builds an eccentric home, then kills himself. Miles wouldn’t mind if his soon-to-be-ex wife’s boyfriend followed suit, but in the meantime he’s practically indentured to the suicide’s widow, a formidable woman with a Nietzschean streak: “People confuse power with will because so few of them have the foggiest idea what they want,” she tells Miles, who runs a diner that she owns, the last outpost of a once-mighty empire. She promises that one day it will be his, but she’s too stubborn to die, and all he can do is hope in a town where the mills are closed and few people have much to do or look forward to.

Then there are the Mintys, once “an entire family of poachers,” now the town’s scourges. One is a cop whom Miles, so mild-mannered as to be nearly passive, finally takes on in a fistfight. It doesn’t end well, although the dust-up, deeply overshadowed by a tragedy that shapes the book’s conclusion, is enough to propel him, finally, out of a town that will never love him back. About his only fan, in fact, is his father, Max—a ne’er-do-well who isn’t above stealing from the town’s Catholic church for beer money and whose motto would seem to be “So what?” Still, Max turns out to be more helpful, and even a touch smarter, than we might expect.

Published 20 years ago, Empire Falls is in a lineage of books that appreciate rural places for their virtues—including the wisdom of such waggish characters—as well as their sometimes-suffocating demerits. Max, Miles, and Tick are made whole when they can finally leave a place that normally allows one to depart only in a casket. Stephen King has written of such places, and so have Marilynne Robinson, Raymond Carver, Kent Haruf, and Russell Banks, whose Affliction is a dark mirror image of Russo’s novel. Understanding such places and their too often overlooked people is a central task of today’s politics, and Richard Russo’s empathetic, generous novel is a good place to start.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.