Leaving Stone Mountain | Los Angeles Review of Books

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Yet Under the Falls stands apart from these texts because, as the name Stone Mountain and its Confederate associations should imply, Russo links his perennial theme of white working-class struggle and misery—what we might call the Gloversville theme—to the South’s “Lost Cause” and, more broadly, to white racist laments for a bygone era. Here, more than in any of his other novels, Russo tempers his personal attachment to a Rust Belt story with a new awareness of how white Americans have long manipulated facts to generate a self-serving and hateful version of the past. The text’s invocation of the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol highlights Russo's interest in distinguishing the white workers of his novel from the “young white men waving Nazi flags and members of the KKK and conspiracy-theory-stoked militiamen” whom he decried in a recent Lit Hub essay.

To be sure, Under the Falls takes regional history seriously through a steady focus on Tyler and his ambivalent feelings about the area. The novel begins with Tyler and his band arriving in Stone Mountain to play a benefit show for Doc, a friend rendered paraplegic by a terrible fall years before. Already uneasy about his return after decades away, Tyler grows even more anxious when Doc informs him that “not everybody on the Mountain is a Tyler Sinclair fan.” Doc explains: “It’s not just that you made all that money, […] It’s that you made it writing songs about us. […] Where’s our cut? is how they look at it.” “The Long Fall,” Tyler’s most famous song, offers ready ammunition to his detractors: inspired by Doc’s accident, the tune allegorizes the town’s economic demise and social crisis. Tyler has turned his friend’s suffering and his community’s misery into popular music and benefited in the process.