Bridge of Sighs

Janet Maslin

It is not possible to describe what Mr. Russo does without letting the word "quirky" creep in. That's because so much of Bridge of Sighs concerns itself with oddball details, from petty rivalries between the Lynch and Marconi families to the Lynch in-house dispute about how to run a convenience store…But in the midst of these small matters, the big contours of Bridge of Sighs emerge. They are richly evocative and beautifully wrought, delivered with deceptive ease. Another of Mr. Russo's hallmarks is that wonderfully unfashionable gift for effortless storytelling on a sweeping, multigenerational scale…Some of this book's most memorable moments take the form of sharp, funny storytelling. Some emerge more amorphously through intuitive visions. And each of the main characters has a Bridge of Sighs lodged somewhere in his or her consciousness. Robert Noonan's arrives, unbidden, on one of his canvases. Sarah's also manifests itself through art. And Lucy's exists in the state of semiconsciousness into which he has crept fearfully since that childhood disturbance. It tempts him to get out of Thomaston. Even more persuasively, Mr. Russo tempts his readers to come in.
—The New York Times

Ron Charles

Richard Russo was already the patron saint of small-town fiction, but with his new novel, Bridge of Sighs—his first since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls—he's produced his most American story. Once again he places us in a finely drawn community that's unable to adjust to economic changes, and with insight and sensitivity he describes ordinary people struggling to get by. But more than ever before, Russo ties this novel to the oldest preoccupations of our national consciousness by focusing on the nature of optimism and the limits of self-invention…in the course of this enormous and enormously moving novel, I was continually seduced by Russo's insight and gentle humor, his ability to discern the ways we love and frustrate each other. Toward the end, before a trip to Boston, Lucy writes, "We will leave this small, good world behind us with the comfort of knowing it'll be here when we return." One sets down Russo's work with the same comforting reassurance.
—The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

The challenge facing those who perform Russo's novels is the self-effacing, low-key nature of his protagonists. The line between a faithful rendition of the character and a snoozer may be as narrow as the street that divides the rich from the poor in Russo's upstate New York town of Thomaston. Unfortunately, Morey's performance finds itself the poor side of the tracks. Lou C. ("Lucy") Lynch's narration of events is read in an even, objective tone as if Morey were reading the evening news on an amateur radio show. He does emphasize words and ideas, but the overall effect is monotonous and doesn't do justice to Russo's rich material. Morey's narrative voice for Bobby, Lucy's childhood friend and nemesis, is deeper but more of the same. Morey gives a bit more energy to the third narrator, Sarah, Lou's wife. The result is more soporific than a Thanksgiving turkey, and getting through Russo's sharp account of the factory towns he knows so well becomes more a chore than a pleasure. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Aug. 13). (Oct.)

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Library Journal

With the same humor and pathos that turned Empire Fallsand Straight Maninto best sellers, Russo's latest tale unravels the tangled skein of love, regret, hope, and longing that wraps itself around friends and family in a small upstate New York town. Russo's multigenerational tale follows the fortunes of two families, especially the careers of the respective sons. Although Louis Charles Lynch and Bobby Marconi come from very different backgrounds, they bond over Bobby's defense of Lou in elementary school. As they grow older, they drift apart, with Bobby changing his name to Robert Noonan and moving to Venice, where he becomes a world-famous artist. Louis stays in Thomaston, marries high school sweetheart Sarah (also an artist), and helps out his family in their grocery store. Although Louis reluctantly agrees to visit Venice with Sarah, several events converge to alter their plans (including Sarah and Bobby's possible love for each other), and their lives change in ways that neither could have anticipated. While Russo's tale gets off to a slow start and the attempt to tell the parallel stories of Louis and Bobby is not always successful, Russo's novel is nevertheless a winning story of the strange ways that parents and children, lovers and friends connect and thrive. [See Prepub Alert, LJ6/1/07.]
—Henry L. Carrigan Jr.

Kirkus Reviews

A dying town symbolizes arcs separately traced by people who abandon it and others who stubbornly stay home, believing change must be for the best, in Russo's (The Whore's Child: and Other Stories, 2005, etc.) crowded sixth novel. Its setting (fictional Thomaston in upstate New York) resembles that of both his early books set thereabouts (Mohawk, The Risk Pool) and his New England-based Pulitzer-winner Empire Falls. Thomaston is the site of the now-defunct tannery that had provided jobs and is now suspected of causing cancer. It's the hometown of Lou C. Lynch (tormented, inevitably, by the lasting nickname "Lucy") and his wife Sarah, now 60-ish and hoping to pass on their family's "empire" of convenience stores to the next generation. A narrative composed by Lou (about his hometown and himself) is juxtaposed with memories of his childhood and youth, and with a parallel narrative set in Venice, where the Lynches' childhood friend Bobby Marconi now lives as a gifted, renegade artist-and a cancer victim. Nobody now writing rivals Russo at untangling the knots of family connection, love and sexuality, ambition and compromise, fidelity and betrayal that link and afflict a formidable gallery of vividly observed, generously portrayed characters. Prominent among them: Lou's eternal-optimist father and namesake; his stoical mother Tessa; the lower-class boys who taunt and threaten him and the girls he turned to (and sometimes loved); and the luckless Marconis, victimized by a viciously abusive father. Every page bristles with life. True, many of the details and motifs (e.g., an embattled family business; prosperity transformed by inevitable change; a black-sheep sibling) closely echo the matter ofEmpire Falls. Nevertheless, this is a wise, uplifting book: a big-hearted, often comic, yet sturdily realistic testament to the resiliency of ordinary people who surprise us, and themselves, by coping, rebuilding and moving on. Rich, confounding and absorbing-utterly irresistible. First printing of 200,000

The Barnes & Noble Review

After a lifetime lived in the same small upstate New York town, Lou C. Lynch, a deeply cautious and conventional man, is headed for a vacation in Italy. It's an improbable leap for this most improbable hero of Bridge of Sighs, but with Richard Russo -- master of blue-collar life (and a Pulitzer Prize winner, after all) -- at the helm, even the most oddball of setups can yield riches.

There's nothing much heroic about Lou, who was saddled with the unfortunate nickname "Lucy" during roll call on his first day of kindergarten. He's 60 years old now, large and soft, married for 40 years to his wife, Sarah. They own three small corner markets in Thomaston, a company town whose main industry, a tannery, has literally poisoned the soil they live on.

The Italy trip is Sarah's idea, and though Lou is outwardly willing, he's dreading it. Sure, he gets his passport and reads a guidebook or two, but he also chooses this time to start writing a memoir. It's here that we meet him, in the pages of his own book, in which he seeks to make sense of his life. There's nothing about his fussy, formal, and sometimes florid voice that can prepare us for the explosive mysteries his recollections expose.

Each question has multiple answers that, as they shape this novel's sweeping saga, force an examination of love and fate and destiny. Along the way, Russo introduces a dizzying number of characters. There's Lou's father, a cockeyed optimist, and his mother, forced into the thankless role of pragmatist. There's the enigma of Bobby's parents, a beaten-down wife and a sadistic husband. It's Sarah's father, a pot-smoking high school teacher, who cracks open the story -- and his students' minds -- with his bent and belligerent genius. Lou, an innocent, loves -- and mourns -- them all in his memoir. His inner voice, unlike his buffoonish exterior, reveals unexpected depth. "The loss of a place isn't really so different from the loss of a person," Lou writes. "Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence."

Russo plays with time throughout Bridge of Sighs. He switches voices from young Lou to grown-up Lou, from grown-up Bobby to Bobby at 18 years old. It's a rare gift, to be able to tell a story backward and forward and sideways all at once. Keeping us balanced on the slender ledge of what was and what may be takes a master's skill, and Russo's got it. He lures you through each page, eager to see how the destinies of these very different people will collide. And collide they will, there's no mistaking Russo's intent. As the climax draws near, it feels like those delicious, vertiginous moments of ascent in a roller coaster, where all that's familiar slips away and there you are, flying through space, just that slender bar across your lap to keep you safe.

There are plenty of small, treasurable moments, too. Here's teenage Lou thinking about sex for perhaps the first time as he watches a couple of classmates leave his father's store.

"Let's go," Jerzy said, then hooked his index finger into the waistband of Karen's slacks and gave it a gentle tug. When the material stretched, I could see that his finger was between her bare skin and her underpants -- a gesture made even more staggering by the fact that she didn't seem to object. Sex, I thought, just that one word. The slender finger slipped down between her bare skin and panties meant sex. Russo's writing is so tidy and precise that when he carelessly repeats a word in a single sentence, it carries the shock of a misplayed chord. Twice, a fleeing woman's suitcase falls open to spill its secret contents into a public street. The shirts and bras and toothbrush and panties all get stuffed back in, "after which, of course, it wouldn't close." We get what it means -- that after a certain kind of breaking point, there's no going back -- but what's it mean to Russo that he plays the same scene twice?

In the end, Bridge of Sighs is as much about class as it is about place. It's about the divisions within a town and within a character's heart. As Lou moves from the bad to the better to the good side of town, as he marries and raises a family, loses and gains friends, he asks himself -- and us -- is he a person who lives his dreams, or does he flee them?

A final question, in the closing pages of the book, seems directed to the reader as well: "How many times, after all, does the same person get to break your heart?" Lou asks.

That depends. When it's Russo, writing this soulful, painful and, yes, hopeful story, the answer turns out to be as many times as there are pages to be turned. --Veronique de Turenne

Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles-based journalist, essayist and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.