Book Review 14: Bridge of Sighs: Richard Russo

Richard Russo
Bridge of Sighs
Alfred A. Knopf
528 Pages

Writers write. These words damn those of us who think we would like to write. A harsh indictment of lack of discipline or even worse lack of talent or creativity but... it is what it is. Richard Russo is a writer. Although you can only find 7 of his books at Amazon there is actually an 8th which has been published and they are all, surprisingly in their own way brilliant. Most of his prose is about small towns in upstate New York although he did a brilliant book about life as a university professor (Straight Man) which was, frankly, fucking hilarious. the narrator english professor of that book had a theory that life was one long punch line to a bad joke and that he was, in all respects, just a straight man. Brilliant.

As I said most of his catalogue are small town, upstate New York stories of shut down, dying factory towns. They are populated by small town powerful families with fortunes on the wane and the common people who brilliantly and heartbreakingly surround them. he has done it at least four times now. First in “Mohawk”, the “Nobody’s Fool”, the Empire Falls” and now in “Bridge of Sighs.” When I realized it was another book about a small dying factory town in upstate New York and that it was 528 pages I sighed and wondered inside my head whether I still had the strength for another Russo book of this genre. After all, a guy can only have so much to say about this topic...right? Well, it IS at least partially right.

Russo, who grew up there paints these towns like a portrait that you cannot look away from. Brilliant, heartbreaking detail on every page and to be fair in every word. Like a great painting no word is out of place and you marvel at the detail and how it illuminates everything and it just seems to real. And he does it in each book. Bridge of sighs is set in a town called Thomaston and it is no different then Mohawk or Empire Falls. Cities which once had a factory town, an economy and an A&P but now have a dead or dying downtown, a dwindling hard scrabble population and if they were in current times a Wal-Mart 20 miles away where everyone shops. No one moves to one of these towns voluntarily so outsiders are normally drifters or people whose lives tanked in some real city and they have been banished here. They wander around with the “locals” who have been there for several generations and as a family stood as witnesses for the decay all around them.

So that is the same in all the books and even though brilliant it is numbing. What makes a Russo book are the nuanced characters he draws and for good or ill as he gets older he draws them with more and more detail. You really do know his characters and as they develop you are never surprised but it is still insightful, into them and into the reader. He makes me self identify more then any other author with the doomed traits of his characters and also with some of the subtle joy and grace that comes from just living life. As his characters pilot their lives through every day occurrences, school, jobs, deaths and births he gives you a sense for the expansiveness of it all and the uniqueness related to the sameness of each persons struggle.

All that having been said there are not many triumphs for the characters in “Bridge of Sighs.” We meet the Lynch family who has a brilliant mother who has settled for a nice, pleasant local boy rather then go off to college and getting out of Thomaston. Mr. Lynch is a kind man and a well loved village idiot and they have a son and a small grocery store. The son, Lou C. Lynch is forever condemned to the name Lucy and his friend comes from another dark local family called the Marconis and his best friend is their son Bobby. The majority of the story is about Lucy and Bobby and a local girl named Sarah Berg who settles for Lucy, as her mother in law settled for Lucy’s dad.

We follow Lucy almost from birth and get introduced to Bobby and Sarah at appropriate points. Bobby’s part is narrated from Italy which was where he escaped to be an artist while Lucy and sarah are in Thomaston telling their story and bopping occasionally back to the present and their own bittersweet marriage as they watch their son, married to an unhappy woman, playing out what they view (or at least she views) as their failures. Sarah’s character is generationally removed from her mother in law Tessa Lynch and might have an over all kinder disposition but they are both women who love, keep secrets and try and make the shrewdest decisions for their families that they can determine at the time and wonder that this situational calculating never leads them anywhere else but with the same struggles they had in years past.

The other characters are all brilliant. Different husbands and fathers, the high school teacher, the bar owner, brother in laws, girlfriend’s parents.... they populate this little dying town like an ant colony and everyone has a purpose and when people deviate from the purpose they either get destroyed or leave. These side characters add the texture to this really rich novel that like a really good movie, never really goes anywhere but takes the reader on a long journey.

And that was the big bone I had to pick with Russo. I am now old and while I used to bang out 50 pages a night reading I find i nod off laying in bed after 10 -15 hard fought pages so it took me all of November to read this and as I was reading it, for 400 pages I thought...”I think I am done with this guy” (meaning Russo) and it was almost a relief thinking I could finish this one and I had finished with the author and his long novels about the same town with a different name. Sure the characters were interesting and the setting brilliant but seriously, 4 times is enough. but then i hit the last hundred pages. The people’s lives unfold in ways that keep you reading incredulously but as you read and think, you know these folks and it could not have happened any other way for any of them and it is all just so sad and so beautiful and so much like our own lives where we plan and scheme and struggle and in the end can never get away from ourselves. And while that might seem bad, even in his ugliest characters, class bullies, town drinks, philandering wives and husbands.... they all have some grace and beauty, just like we all do and he reveals that and as he does reveals us, and gives pause and seriously does everything a great book should do.

He has a way of letting his characters age and as they do they learn things about themselves, some of them good but most unsettling. As you read about their jouney he allows you through their lives to have little “aha” monets of your own which are sometimes good but mostly unsettling. 60 pages before the end of the book he ends a chapter as Lucy lays in bed a 60 year old man, staring at his sleeping wife who will leave him forever in the morning:

“The line of the gray horizon is brighter now, and with the coming light I feel a certainty: that there is, despite our wild imaginings, only one life. The ghostly others, no matter how real they seem, no matter how badly we need them are phantoms. The one life we’re left with is sufficient to fill and refill our imperfect hearts with joy, and then to shatter them. And it never, ever lets up.
Blame love.”

That is good stuff.
But after that he surprises again with a nice 60 page sprint to the finish. The story does not end up happily every after for everyone but there is discovery and there is some peace of mind and purpose for a few of the characters and a little nice symetry. The books characters are well enough drawn that even for me there is a lot of emotion in their successes and failures and weaker person (me) might even tear up.

Even though it sometimes felt like it was a marathon, This was the best thing I have read all year and perhaps in a long time. it is probably Russo’s best book because he draws with so much confidence and is obviously at the height of his game. Wait until it comes out as a paperback next year. take it to the beach and lose yourself in the life of a small, dying factory town in upstate New York with a poisoned river, cancer, no possibilities, human tragedies and broken souls. Enjoy it.

10 Slingers on the 10 scale