Empire Falls

“As a boy Miles had been a climber,” the narrator informs the reader; he was “so fearless that he’d driven his mother into paroxysms of terror” (44). However, in adulthood, Miles has developed a crippling fear of heights: “Somewhere along the line he’d become terrified of heights, and the idea of painting the steeple made him weak in the knees” (44). Symbolically speaking, the analogy is clear: Miles was once destined to climb high, unencumbered and unafraid, but he had somehow lost his nerve and forsaken his ambitions. The narrator provides an apt metaphor: “For all his early promise, Miles had scaled no heights, and now, at forty-two, he was so afraid of them that he cowered near the steel doors of glass elevators, reluctant to move back away from them and let others step on” (45). Miles is stuck, as it were, in between floors and in between opportunities, mired in middle age.

Miles is not the only one for whom scaling the heights of success has been elusive. Janine too is facing middle age with trepidation and self-pity. At the homecoming football game, she is disappointed by her mother’s refusal to save them seats near the top: “Janine understood about her mother’s aching feet and why she hadn’t wanted to climb all the way to the top as Janine had begged her. But damn, she’d hoped to get farther up than this” (279). Again, the metaphor is clear: Janine’s life is also stuck, and she is left in between a man who relishes his routines to the point of drudgery and a man whose character and intelligence are questionable at best. The frequent invocation of heights—there are many scenes wherein Mrs. Whiting is looking down at the Robys from across the river—functions to emphasize the fading dreams and vivid regrets that accompany the onset of middle age.

Martha’s Vineyard is both the place where some of Miles’s most vivid memories occur and the location where he invests his dreams for the future. It is the island repository of both Miles’s past and Miles’s future, which keeps him from truly living in his present existence: As his brother David observes, he lives only in the present, while Miles thinks “only about the past and future” (226). It is notable that Martha’s Vineyard is an island, a geographical creation defined by isolation and detachment; thus, it functions as much as a metaphor for Miles’s state of mind as it does an actual place.

Coming back from his trip with Tick, Miles reflects upon his many regrets: “Every year he left the island haunted by a profound feeling of personal failure” (102). It is not merely that he cannot afford to live there; he also feels he failed his mother there—though it will take him the discovery of Charlie Mayne’s real identity to come to terms with the latter. Even David recognizes that “Martha’s Vineyard” has become an unhealthy fixation for Miles: “Think about it, Miles. A little island, another world, miles away, at safe yearning distance. Something you can desire without ever being expected to strive for. [...] The sad part is that you don’t love Martha’s Vineyard. It was Mom who loved it” (224). The dream of Martha’s Vineyard isn’t even Miles’s dream; it is his attempt to reclaim his mother’s dream. It is no coincidence that he and Tick return to Martha’s Vineyard to heal after the school shooting; it represents Miles’s motherland. It also bodes well for their future that Miles eventually decides to grow up, leave the land of childhood, and return to Empire Falls as a man.